


Lion Thing

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: (not between Arthur and Eames), Aftercare, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, BDSM, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Protective Urges, Shifters, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, bad bdsm, sex that is technically consensual but really unpleasant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 10:12:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5963542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur will let people do almost anything to him if he's got their full attention. If he can't have what he wants, he might as well have <i>something</i>. He's giving his shifter roommate Eames an ulcer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Arthur’s roommate was a man of few words. At least, Arthur and his roommate didn’t share words very often. Arthur had met him once before he’d moved in, for lunch, just to make sure they wouldn’t hate each other on sight before Arthur showed up with a pick-up truck full of most of his belongings. The ad had been terse, limited to the skeleton of details about the apartment, and Arthur hadn’t had a lot of options. They’d sat across from one another, Arthur’s appetite lost to nerves and watched as Eames worked through his barely-cooked steak. There was a muscle in his forearm that worked when he cut through the meat and Arthur kept trying not to stare. 

It had only taken a few minutes before Eames had given him his prognosis: “You’ll do fine,” he said, staring hard at Arthur, like everything was decided and he now expected Arthur to fall into line. Eames had a blond mess of hair, and long fair eyelashes that seemed to disappear in the august sunlight and Arthur, tongue-tied, could only nod.

He hadn’t even realized the thing about him for months, because when he stalked around the apartment, he was all human, soft sloping shoulders and golden skin, and when he chatted on the phone, calling his mom on sunday’s like every parent wanted, his vowels and consonants were as indistinguishable as anything -- he could have been a weatherman from the midwest. It wasn’t until Arthur had come home one night after sitting through an open-mic night at his favorite coffee shop to a room full of people in various stages of shift, fur and skin on the same source, bright eyes and a woman with a beak, perched on their living room furniture that he’d caught on.

“Oh,” he said. 

Eames, who’d had a mane and a long, powerful tail at the time, had met his eyes fiercely. “Yeah,” he said, in an even voice, “I have my pack over. Not a problem, is it?”

And Arthur, heart in his mouth looked down. “‘Course not, man,” he said. “We’re millennials. No big deal.”

 

*

 

Of course, it  _ was  _ a big deal. It probably explained the fact that Eames kept to himself so much. Arthur must have seemed so pathetic to him: a friendless human hovering in every doorway like some kind of hopeless idiot. No wonder they hardly talked. Everything he knew about the man he’d learned second-hand, from the discarded comments he’d make to his mother, padding through the apartment in a towel, phone pinched between his shoulder and his face, in the newspapers he left out with mostly finished crosswords, and the DVR, which was always full of trashy talk-shows. 

It wasn’t like Eames was rude, but Arthur was awkward, and between being super gorgeous and the alpha of his pack, it was pretty clear that Eames was about a dozen kinds of  _ out of his league,  _ on top of  _ probably straight,  _ and in the spirit of not having a repeat of his most traumatic years, he mostly kept to himself.

Besides the notable time that he’d found a copy of one of his favorite sci-fi novels  _ Spin,  _ laying out on the kitchen table. “Are you done with this?” he asked.

“Yeah,” he’d grinned, taking opposite corners and holding the book between the points of his index fingers, “but I think I have to start over now that I’m done. They terra-form Mars in hyperspeed because of a time-shell.”

It was the most he’d heard from him since they'd started sharing an address, and it was as if someone had given him a cheat code that let him right into Arthur’s brain. For a minute, he forgot to be paralyzingly shy in the face of Eames’s gorgeous, sunbathed-predator bone structure. “I know! I read it when I was still young enough to really buy into hard sci-fi as the tech of the future and it messed up my ability to tell fact from fiction.”

Eames let out a full laugh, and Arthur felt pleased and a little warm. “Sounds like my high school autobiography. How to let books ruin your life by setting up weird expectations of how cool technology comes along, by me.”

 “You’d have to use a very small font to fit that on the cover,” Arthur mused. 

“Anyways, the terra-forming aside, I really, really love reading about weird cults. Especially religious ones. I might just skip back to those bits and read them again,” he said, gesturing with the book. Then, he actually went and did that and Arthur considered their conversation over. 

For some reason, Arthur never seemed to be able to bring it up again. The next time he’d looked at him, the casual counter-top sitting roommate was gone and the predator was back, and instead of building on their tentative rapport, he’d clammed up and ducked out of the way. 

It wasn’t like he really needed to be friends with him to live there, anyway. It was better like this, not jeopardizing his living situation with the silly stirrings of his stupid spider-web heart where he collected things and never found a way to purge them when he was done. He’d found a place to live in the city, and he had his job in the call center, following a rote flow-chart of  _ what can I help you deal with, ma’am,  _ and if he ever needed something else, well, that’s what strangers were for. 

 

*

 

The man at the end of the bar had seemed incredibly interested in Arthur from afar, but now that he had stopped by, he couldn’t be less engaged. He’d been eyeing him for forty minutes, at least, while they’d both eaten on opposite ends of the bar, both seemingly watching the same game, and when Arthur floated into his space after, just to check, the other man had immediately offered Arthur a drink. He’d appreciated it, but indicated with a tilt of the glass tumbler he was still holding that he was still working on his own.

“Great game, huh?” Arthur said, smiling. 

“What? Oh, no, sorry, I don’t really follow,” the other man said, waving vaguely with his unlit cigarette, as if he couldn’t even bring himself to say the word  _ sport.  _

Arthur frowned.  “Must have been mistaken,” he said. “I thought we’d been watching the same match.”

The man at the bar shrugged at him, as if Arthur was quite possibly mentally ill and was humoring him. Arthur wasn’t totally charmed with the way he’d run hot and cold in short order, but he’d been obvious enough with his appreciation of Arthur’s appearance, even if he seemed disinclined to chat. Some men, Arthur knew, liked to make him work for it. 

Arthur, in an attempt to play along and alleviate the awkwardness that had descended in so quickly, tried to make small talk about all the things he was thinking about lately.  The song playing had a reference to Nick Drake in it, which Arthur was charmed by.  _ The saddest man on earth,  _ he’d heard Drake called once. The people closest to him hoped for different things regarding his death: his mother had convinced herself that he’d been turning his life around and coming out of his depression, and had overdosed on accident, and his sister couldn’t bear the thought that he’d  _ wanted  _ to live, but had killed himself by mistake, so she hoped he had intended it. It boggled his brain that two people could look at the same situation and find opposite interpretations of what would be the very worst thing. The man at the bar frowned thoughtfully while he was talking, and Arthur had thought he was making progress. Then he’d opened his mouth and said, “How interesting,” as if he thought it was anything but.

Arthur felt the other man’s indifference settle in his stomach like a challenge. He gave it another try. He’d read the other day that you could tell what colony an individual bee by doing a DNA test on it, but the article had gone on to mention that DNA testing would only be necessary in legal proceedings. He wondered what sort of circumstances warranted a DNA investigation of bees. 

Did that mean a beekeeper was legally accountable if a bee from one’s colony stung a human? He’d been doing some internet searches on the topic, but it hadn’t yielded any results. It was possible he was going to have to write a letter to a beekeeper. Beekeepers probably had email like everyone else, now, he mused, but for some reason he imagined the whole of the profession so very old fashioned, he’d have to purchase stationery to ask one. 

When the man’s face still looked impassive, and he didn’t have anything to add, Arthur admitted defeat. “Sorry to have wasted your time,” he said, face growing warm as he gripped one wrist tightly like he did when he was feeling self-conscious, over the cuff of his shirt, pressing the cufflinks against the tender spot there. “I’ll stop rambling at you and let you get back to your drink.”

The man’s focus zoomed in on the action, and he stopped tapping his single cigarette against the bar. “No,” he said, reaching down to catch Arthur’s hands, one trapped in the vice of the other and making to pry away his hand. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Arthur,” he said, his mouth dry. His stomach churned in anxiety as the other man pushed back his cuff, and inspected the fading circle of discolored skin there. 

“Well Arthur,” he said, holding Arthur’s wrist in his own warm, calloused hand, and giving it a quick squeeze, causing him to shudder: “it seems my initial assessment about us having nothing in common was wrong.”

Which is pretty much how Arthur found himself following the man outside, half-dragged along by their own point of contact at his wrist. Arthur’s heart thumped loud in his ears with his rising sense of panic, and he had to remind himself,  _ you wanted this,  _ and chided himself for being finicky. He’d left the house earlier tonight with a desperate wish that he could just have someone’s focus. It was no time to punk out now. 

He let the other man roughhouse him into his car, even though his own was still parked at the bar. Being assertive was hardly his strong suit. He was always letting himself get swept along, and making inconvenient arrangements behind himself: he’d take a cab back here from the other man’s place later, he thought, amending his evening’s plan on the fly, fumbling into the passenger’s seat. 

“Nice car, uh,” he said, pausing, to let the other man tell him his name, which he’d left out intentionally when Arthur had introduced himself, part of his game, obviously, but now Arthur thought they’d moved past it. He was in his car and everything. He’d buckled his seatbelt.

“Sir is fine,” he said, flicking his car into drive noiselessly. 

Arthur almost rolled his eyes. It seemed a little familiar to be that douchey, but he was here, and he’d be focused on him for a while, which was more contact than Arthur had had with another human in a while. He swallowed his reply and sat silently in the car, watching out the window as they whirred past the night sky, everything outside turning into a navy blur. Arthur gave himself a few moments to fantasize that things were happening differently, because he had this stupid thought his heart couldn’t seem to let go of that one day he was going to try to tell someone about something inside of him: the world’s loneliest whale who sings in fifty-two hertz or about growing a vegetable and coaxing it into the wrong shape, and someone was going to respond in kind with something they also found interesting. 

It didn’t even matter what: Arthur could be interested in anything, so long as someone got passionate talking about it. If he’d met the man driving and he’d responded, and they’d had a nice chat and then he’d said,  _ let’s get something to eat, I’d love to tell you about the most well-loved forgery in Paris, it hung in the Louvre for years…  _ the tension in the car would have been something else, and the night sky, a smeared mess of stars and smoky nighttime clouds, would have been uncontainably gorgeous. He would have been wound tight with something else. 

Arthur sat in his fantasy for a few quiet minutes, long enough to be indulgent with himself, and then put himself back where he was, half anticipating but dreading it equally. The other man was interested in Arthur like a shark: he wanted blood in the water. He’d clearly been ready to dismiss him before he’d seen the half-ring of bruises on his wrist, realize that Arthur was lonely enough to let himself be thumped around if it meant he’d get someone’s full attention for an hour or two. 

Which, he supposed, wasn’t inaccurate.

And he was handsome, in a sterilized, over-moneyed sort of way. But he didn’t even have a name. Arthur could already tell that he was going to spend the evening trying creatively side-step calling him  _ sir.  _

He hadn’t even said anything since they’d gotten in the car: he’d just let Arthur stew in his own anxiety. He wondered if anyone ever liked it, if people thought this tension was nice. The other man had been unfriendly before they’d left together, so it was probably the way he was, which was disappointing. Usually that was the appeal of the whole thing: the types of guys that wanted to take Arthur home and thump him around often liked to give him a bit of a cuddle when he was all battered, touch reverently the places they’d damaged. A lot of guys that took him home got sweet after, and having a snack with someone after they’d gone boneless was the highlight of the whole evening. 

He had no such hopes for this evening. He imagined the man beside him would be just as tense and uptight afterwards. He amended his plan again: he’d wait for him to get off and he’d take off. He wouldn’t even shower, because he could do that at home. He wished they had a detailed itinerary already, so he could call a cab in advance. It was cold outside, and it’d be awkward to wait on the curb. He could shower when he got home, and if he came in quietly enough, he wouldn’t disturb his roommate, who wouldn’t be impressed with the state of him.  

The drive from the bar to the man’s apartment was long enough that Arthur had time to regret getting in the car, which was the worst part. The asshole hadn’t even put any music on, or made any attempt to make small talk. He was going to do all the things that Arthur tolerated, and even liked, a bit, if it were paired with the rest, without any of  _ the rest.  _ He tried to keep track of the turns, and eventually, they made it into a fancy-looking neighborhood, where his sleek Jaguar was hardly the nicest car in the lot. 

In profile, he was quite handsome, body long and flattered in his well-fitted suit, and the strong line of his jaw would probably feel rather pleasant if rubbed playfully over Arthur’s collar, but he doubted any of that was in store for him. 

 

*

 

He’d been right, of course. He’d taken off his leather jacket at the other man’s request, and it was so stupid that he was in someone’s home, preparing to have rough sex with someone who wouldn’t even give him his name that Arthur was berating himself at length. He was down to his button up, and he’d at least expected to be offered a bottle of water. 

“Go wait back there,” he said, pointing at the door past the kitchen with his elbow without looking in that direction. Arthur sidled past him, tongue set between his molars in a punishing clench, and giving a curt nod. 

_ Fuck _ , he thought, the word sinking in his chest like something set to sea. They hadn’t even talked about the details, and he was already ushering him into his room. It wasn’t too late to do something else. He had a fleeting, panicky thought: he could call Eames. As soon as he’d had it, Arthur’s inner, sane,  _ intelligent  _ thoughts took over, shoving that idea down with the force it deserved. One did not panic during sexual encounters and call one’s straight roommates to pick one up from sketchy encounters, not when both of you were adults and one of you was secretly attracted to the other.  _ This  _ was why he needed to be here: otherwise he just spent all of his time hovering on the edges of their shared flat, hoping wistfully to make eye contact with his cohabitant, and feeling like those moments sustained him til the next. He was bound to make him uncomfortable enough sooner or later that Eames was going to ask him to leave. 

Instead, he was going to sit awkwardly on the edge of this stranger’s bed, gripping his own wrist until his heart rate evened out. A minute unfolded, and then another. Which was frustrating, because he didn’t even really get turned on by this sort of encounter except that someone that brought you over to hurt you was usually pretty magnetized to your presence, at least for as long as it took to get them suitably worn out. Arthur was feeling a little miffed that so far his night had jumped the rails completely. He should have gone home to reread  _ The Graveyard Book.  _

Neil Gaiman never made him wait alone in his room without anything to do with his hands. 

Something occurred to Arthur, intimidating on the horizon. This stranger had been quite stoic, and seemed unlikely to make conversation. At some point, Arthur was going to have to be mindful, and if the stranger didn’t go for one of his own accord, Arthur was going to have to insist he put a condom on, he thought miserably. He knew it was stupid to get worked up before an issue even presented itself (maybe he’d been all wrong and he’d play by the book and be polite afterward, make him a mug of tea before he asked him to leave) but he had a sinking feeling. He amended and amended and amended, but that wasn’t something he was willing to amend. He felt the preemptive awkwardness of confrontation, and practiced while he was alone. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to insist,” he said, in a very quiet voice. 

“Did you say something?” the man asked, entering the room with his finger already in his tie. 

“No,” Arthur said, blushing. 

“And you’re not on the floor.” 

Arthur let his mouth fall open. “You didn’t ask me to be,” he stuttered, and then, with more nerve than he thought he had, he went on, “and we haven’t talked about anything yet.”

The man in front of him sneered a bit, and his expression chilled the air in his lungs. “I assumed you’d done this before, and I wasn’t dealing with a child.”

Arthur swallowed hard against a tidal wave of humiliation. “I, I’m not a child.”

“Really?” he taunted, and Arthur knew it was fucked up, but he felt a little better now that he wasn’t just waiting, tying himself in knots in a stranger’s room. Even sneering, at least he had his whole focus. “Are you sure? Because we can call your mom to pick you up and I can set you outside with a juice box to wait for her.”

For a blank moment, all Arthur could think was:  _ yes please, door number one sounds good.  _ Instead, he rasped, “Yes. I’m sure.”

“Yes what,” he said in a low voice, moving toward Arthur and putting a demanding hand in his hair. 

Arthur felt a wave of distaste as he lowered his eyes. “Yes,  _ sir. _ ” 

 

*

 

In the end, he hadn’t had to fight about the condom situation, which was just about the only upside to his entire fucking night. The man he’d gone home with was relentless, and a little cruel, all blunt pressure and sharp edges with none of the momentary relief. Arthur pushed himself as hard as he would go, but it did him little good. Normally, these were the bits he liked best about stressful encounters: when he hit the mark, and he often did, because he had no sense of self preservation and thought he could weather any storm, so long as it would end in his favor, there was usually a touch to his jaw, his scalp, his lip, where the man who’d taken him home murmured something soft. 

He collected them in a secret place inside of himself, brought them out sometimes when he jacked off alone, with more build up than anyone had ever given him outside of a fantasy, touching his own elbow and the backs of his knees as he replayed his greatest hits:  _ that’s it, how lovely, what a good boy you are, you must be so tired, you did so well,  _ all of the things that would have felt so condescending if it weren’t for the way the men usually looked at him when they said them, pleased and warm. 

There was none of that, just a stranger, setting him up for failure, fucking his throat relentlessly until he was light headed with the lack of air and throat convulsing, on the verge of choking at the rough, ticklish pressure behind his soft palate, and then a swift thumping for pushing at his hip to give himself a moment to breathe; he’d made him count and thank him for every movement, humiliation burning worse in his throat than the man’s penis had. He’d cried a bit at the end there, and then he’d cuffed him to the post of the bed while he’d faffed off, padding off through the door to do God knows what, and Arthur had felt fiercely angry, explaining in his imagination that he didn’t like to be stuck stationary, he only liked to be tied to himself -- his own wrists bound together or wrist to knee, something where he still had a certain degree to move, but as always, his nerves glued his mouth shut. 

This is why he’d pretended to be straight for so long: girls never wanted to use hand-on-his-heart  _ whips  _ with the express goal of making him near-hysterical or left him alone for long periods of time, mid-sex, just to ratchet up his anxiety. 

The man, on the other hand, was  _ really, really  _ into both of those things, and after an hour and a half, he was still wearing his suit trousers, having buttoned them back up after he’d come down Arthur’s throat the first time. He’d yet to get his hand on Arthur’s dick, which was probably for the best because there was no way he was going to will it into hardness. 

Arthur, a little miserable and spaced out in a way that wasn’t the pleasant disconnect from reality he could get when the balance was right. Instead, he mainly felt sore, like more damage than person, overwhelmed and helplessly angry. He was half-drooling when he saw his chance, the man who’d quickly earned the title of  _ least favorite one night stand ever  _ pulled something out of his drawer and set it down on the bed, and it only took half a second for it to sink in that there were condoms there but no little bottle. As the culmination of terrible nights went (humiliated, spunk drying in a splatter on his chest, exhausted and his backside burning from shoulders -- and serious, who the fuck tries to damage someone’s  _ shoulders,  _ there’s no  _ fat there --  _ to his thighs,  cock soft and uninterested in ever participating in life ever again...) it was pretty much the proverbial straw, even for him. 

“Uh,” he said, and pulled on his arm hard enough to cause some serious strain. Worse case, he thought, he’d break his wrist and stumble to the front door. He wouldn’t even have to talk to him, just fifteen feet to the front door and he could get outside, pants on the way,  _ ignore him ignore _ him, all of those thoughts swirling around in a panicked haze, and he was almost surprised by the way his hand finally came free of the handcuff with no sickly sound of displaced bone, just the rough scrape of his hand coming through the metal circle of the cuff. 

The man he was with looked at him with a gaping lower jaw. “What the fuck?” he demanded. 

“I’m sorry,” Arthur stuttered. “I think there’s … I have another commitment,” he said, sounding like an idiot. He scrambled for his clothes on the floor and coming up with only his jeans, panicking about where the hell his shirt could be before his  _ flight, flight only flight  _ reflexes kicked him in the teeth for being ridiculous and he scrambled out of the room, jeans in his arms, and taking his leather jacket from the front door. 

He put his jeans on over his bare ass in the hallway, the man still yelling at him from the apartment, threading his arms through his jacket as he bolted, shoeless, down the stairs. Even feeling like a raw nerve, by the time he hit the pavement outside of the apartment, he was already feeling better. 

He must have looked like a mess, because the first taxi wouldn’t take him. 

Eventually, though, he made it home.


	2. Chapter 2

The light under the door was on.  _ Please _ , he thought fervently,  _ let that just be carelessness _ . It was well after three in the morning after he’d made it back to the bar to get his car and Eames should have been sleeping. He turned his key in the lock with infinite care, and slid the door open with the same. 

Padding in, bare feet on the cool hardwood floor, Arthur finally felt the exhaustion kick in. He’d been running on adrenaline the whole way home, heart beating off-rhythm, but finally, his body seemed to realize he’d nearly made it to the privacy of his own home, his own bed where he could lick his wounds in piece. Every light in the apartment was on, seemingly, but there was no sign of Eames. 

Relieved, Arthur toddled his way to his room, the dull pain of simply existing jolting to life with each clumsy step, but he eventually made it to his bed. He didn’t even take anything off, jeans uncomfortable with no underpants, and he just knew he was going to have to throw out his leather jacket in the morning, which was really a shame, he thought, the lining drying against his pulpy back. 

He was starting to drift off, even though his body was strangely pinched in his position, eyes starting to take long, meandering blinks, collecting thirty seconds of sleep at a time, and he could feel himself on the cusp of the blissful edge of a larger unconsciousness when he heard a sound through the doorway, sharp and loud, that jolted him to full alert. And then another, which is when he placed it. Broken porcelain. A dish, perhaps, or a kitchen tile.

Arthur lurched to his feet, unevenly. “You okay, Eames?” 

There was only grumbling to answer him, pitched low. He sounded angry, and Arthur moved out to the common area, flinching. 

There were broken dishes in the kitchen, smashed into pieces, but his roommate wasn’t human when he got there. 

“What’s wrong, Eames?” he asked, feeling a little sorry for himself. He probably had nerve damage, had definitely had the worst night he’d had in a long time, and here he was, having to take care of his roommate. The unfairness of the universe taunted him like a heavy cloud above him. Which sucked ass, because normally he’d be ecstatic at a chance to see  Eames looking less than composed, and to get a chance to calm him down.

Eames was on his back, golden from mane to tail, with a couch cushion in between his arms, thrusting against it with his back paws. The poor thing didn’t stand a chance, and within ninety seconds, it was completely shredded. “Congrats,” Arthur said, voice hoarse. “There’s stuffing everywhere. You’ve successfully murdered a couch pillow. Is your prey drive sated now?” 

Eames looked at him, shook his head so his enormous mane looked even more formidable, and let out an earsplitting roar. 

Arthur let out an ungainly yelp, putting his hands up to his ears. “Stop,” he shrieked over the long, drawn out sound of his roommates ire. “If you want to talk about what’s got your tail in a knot,” he snarled, when the sound came to an end, “you can shift into your biped posture and come talk to me. If not, I’ve had a long night, and I don’t really want to get evicted because you can’t keep it down at almost...” he glanced over at the clock, “four in the morning.” 

He turned around to go back to his room, climbed under the covers, and promptly burst into furious tears, burrowing himself, and pressed into a tight curve. After several minutes, a lot of his hysteria had ebbed and he simply lay there, breath coming in soft pants, and swiping at his wet face, tears sliding out the corner of his eyes without any of the accompanying drama. 

There is a sound from his doorway. A huff, or something like it. Not human. “Go away, Eames,” he says, miserable. His voice came out embarrassingly wet. Eames let out a deep growl and Arthur uncovered his head. “Do you—” he said, voice splintering, eyes narrowed, “really need me? Right now?”

Usually, when Arthur was home, interacting with him, Eames kept his shape. He rarely shifted in his presence, because Arthur was human, and not part of his pack. He usually didn’t have any problems with him. He’d learned from anecdotal evidence that it didn’t always go that way. Eames, as a shifter and an alpha to boot, should have been prone to displays of animal aggression. Arthur ruefully blamed his own stuttering, impassive tendencies for protecting him from Eames’s need to be the clearly dominant member in a household before those issues came even close to arising. 

He was as gorgeous lion form as he was as a man, muscles rippling as he strode in, stalking cat like in the room, and pacing in the narrow space not taken up by Arthur’s bed, fur meticulous and mane fearsome. Arthur, half out of his mind, wanted to wind his fingers through the thicket, press his face to his muzzle. “Who are you angry at,” he asked, voice limp. “Can you be mad at me tomorrow if I’ve done something to set you off?”

Eames had been letting off a more or less continuous low growl since he’d entered Arthur’s room. As he said the last thing, it stopped dead in its tracks. So did Eames. Arthur watched with burning eyes as Eames stalked out of his room, was gone for ten or fifteen seconds before he came padding back in as a man, dark golden hair sticking up in all directions, all the muscles in his body tense like a pulled bow string, and only his bottom half covered in a pair of black cotton sweat pants. “I didn’t mean to make you think,” he said, haltingly. A muscle in his jaw worked, jumping and receding. “That I was angry at you.”

“Good to know,” Arthur said. He hadn’t thought he could have been any more humiliated at any point tonight, but apparently he was wrong. He’d known, of course, that Eames had seen him looking pathetic, but it was a whole different thing. It felt new, with Eames wearing his perfect human face, human eyes. When the lion had been looking at him, Arthur’s stupid human instincts told him he was safe from perception, as if he’d been an ordinary lion, order  _ carnivora,  _ family  _ felidae,  _ species  _ panthera leo,  _ but now with only his own enormous eyes, intelligence and disdain clear in them, Arthur wanted to die of shame. 

Eames was silent for a long time, and Arthur’s own internal mocking misery created a song to pass the time:  _ the man you have a crush on has seen you cry and knows you’re a pussy and you’re going to die alone.  _ After several repetitions of that verse, Eames said, “I don’t want you to do that again.”

“Do what,” Arthur said, not even able to muster the energy for a properly questioning inflection. 

Eames came right to the edge of his bed, crouching down beside him. “You have to know what the fuck I’m angry about.” 

Arthur thought about the broken dishes. “Are you seriously unspun about the state of the kitchen?” he choked out, not believing the nerve of his roommate. “Dude. I have not had the kind of night where you can break shit because I left some dishes in the sink.”

Eames was practically shaking now, badly contained fury coming off of him in waves, his hands flexing in angry spasms. His fingers were starting to sprout claws again, and Arthur focused on his hands with an edge of trepidation as they oscillated back and forth between human fingernails and claws. “No,” he said, low voice resonating like an angry cello. “You know why the fuck I’m angry.”

“I honestly don’t,” Arthur said, “and I don’t appreciate you being in my personal space, clearly wanting to attack me. Without a reason, as far as I can tell.”

Eames reached for him and Arthur froze, his heart thumping uneasily in his chest. It was starting to feel sore, like he’d been running for miles without a chance to catch his breath. Eames put his hand at Arthur’s shoulder, pushing it gently back from where it was protectively curled over his torso, and went for the zipper of his jacket. Mouth dry, Arthur let him unzip, inch by careful inch, bare stomach quivering. With Eames so close, Arthur couldn’t help but keep his eyes glued to the golden fuzz of stubbled from his jaw to his neck, chewing on his already ravaged tongue to keep himself from opening his mouth. 

He went to tug at Arthur’s sleeve after he get his zipper all the way to the bottom, and Arthur winced. “Wait,” he said. “That’s not going to… I mean. It’s going to stick.” 

“I fucking know it is,” he growled, and Arthur shivered, trying to pull back. “That’s the fucking problem.”

“I don’t see how my,” Arthur swallowed laboriously, “sexual preferences are any of your business.”

“They weren’t,” Eames said, hand still holding the cuff of his jacket with the slightest bit of tension, like he was holding a rod, not jerking it out of the water yet, but the potential was terrifyingly there. “Until you came home the third fucking time looking like the poster child of the battered women’s club.”

Arthur tensed, trying to pull his sleeve from Eames’s hand, but he wouldn’t let go, and Arthur wasn’t trying to deal with the mess of his drying back until morning, so he didn’t force it out of his grip. “That’s really sexist,” he said. “And again, still not your business what I do in my private life.”

“Maybe,” Eames said, “if you weren’t you. And if you were actually enjoying it.”

Arthur bristled. “You don’t know what I enjoy. And what does that mean, _ if I weren’t me _ .”

“If you weren’t in my pack, asshole. An alpha doesn’t just let members of his pack go off and fuck themselves up for no reason.”

Arthur felt a strange thrill in his stomach. “I’m human.”

“You’re pack. That cannot be news to you,” he said, looking puzzled. “We cohabitate. I wouldn’t be able to do that if you weren’t part of my pack.”

“Okay,” he said. Swallowed against the lump in his throat. A stray tear collected, and he swiped at his face. 

Eames took his chin. “I cannot possibly let you leave to do this to yourself again. I cannot abide it. You’re mine, and you come home smelling like come and sweat and blood, and only the blood is your own, and you smell like anxiety.”

“I … smell like anxiety,” Arthur repeated, a little helplessly. The light went through Eames’s eyes like scotch, amber and complicated and aged, and Eames nodded. 

“You didn’t enjoy any of that. Just like you didn’t the last time. And either that’s because someone is clearly doing things  _ wrong,  _ or because you like to have these encounters where you hardly get anything out of it.”

“You can’t use your extra senses against me to find out my secrets,” he frowned. “It’s not fair,” he said, and his voice wobbled at that last word. 

“I don’t need extra senses to know that. You came in like you’d discharged yourself from the emergency room, against medical advice.”

Arthur winced. “It wasn’t that bad.”

Eames cut him off with a look. 

“I’m going to go get a rag,” he said, eventually. “We are going to get this off. You smell like open wounds and no antiseptic and you came home with  _ no shoes _ . I should pull out his vocal chords with my teeth.” 

“I’m an adult,” Arthur said, weakly. 

“You’re nothing of the sort,” Eames said, turning on his heel. “Don’t wander off.”  

 

*

 

Eames comes back with a cup of water, and a stack of Arthur’s washcloths, already damp. He hands the glass to him, cups his elbow as he takes a long pull from the glass. “You cannot  let this happen again. You’re not to go out for this again.” Eames says, and Arthur has to stop drinking to choke. 

“What!” he gasps. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Eames’s expression is very, very serious. “I am not  _ fucking kidding you, _ ” he says, words like gravel, and he reaches down to take the corner of his unzipped jacket, easing his hand across laterally to find the first point of contact with his bloodied back. 

Arthur watches him, can’t see his own side very well where Eames is starting to work, methodically wetting his wounds to help free the lining of his coat from the dry blood, but he can see Eames’s eyes, intense and unwavering from his task. “Things got out of hand tonight,” Arthur admitted.

Eames let out a quiet puff of air. “You don’t say.”

“But,” he said, and paused to grit his teeth while Eames peeled another inch from his back, “you can’t tell me not to have sex because of it.”

“No,” Eames said, being contrary even as he agreed. He moved around Arthur, getting the the middle of his back. Arthur could feel the feverish heat of him through his exposed, wet skin and wondered if he always ran this hot. Eames waited a long time to finish his thought. “I can’t. Or, I wouldn’t if it was just about sex. But this is about something else. Either no one who ever takes you home knows what they’re doing, or the whole point for you is not to get anything out of these personal encounters.”

_ Personal encounters.  _ It didn’t sound like what he had, actually. Nothing about them felt personal. But there was something, some reason he kept letting it happen, an explanation for whatever men saw in him that made them want to hurt him, and why his voice dried up in his throat when he thought of objecting. 

He let thoughts slip out of his head and let his focus narrow only to the skin of his back, the tension of another person dipped into his mattress, the sure, warm competence of Eames’s hands, touching him for some reason only he knew. He’d called him part of his pack. 

“Well,” Eames said, obviously waiting for him to say something. He sounded like he was coming from far away. 

“Well, what,” Arthur said, eyes dropping closed. 

“Which is it,” Eames demanded, the layered, growling sound coming back into his voice, like an irate harmony. 

“What is what?” Arthur wondered, losing the thread. 

Eames put his hands at the back of Arthur’s neck, pressing the flats of his fingernails into the skin there in a gentle squeeze. There was no broken skin there from earlier, so it didn’t hurt. It did, however, briefly bring him closer to the sharp-surface of attention. “Do you want someone to  _ hurt you, _ ” Eames hissed, “or is someone simply failing to take care of you afterwards?”

“I don’t need anyone to take care of me.” Arthur said, and closed his eyes. He felt like a plane delayed for landing so many times he’d simply had to put his wheels down on a runway he wasn’t cleared for, for fear of falling out of the sky with an empty engine.

 

*

 

In the morning, he woke up loose-limbed and feeling strangely lovely, afternoon sun slanting through his window. He was on his stomach, one arm curled under his pillow and the other stretched out, fingers falling over the drop of the mattress, and it took him several sleepy minutes for the events of the night before to cheerfully arrive at his doorstep to humiliate him, like a high school yearbook. 

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself, jolting out of bed. His body gave a protesting jolt, the skin of his back giving the sharpest complaints, but there was also considerable dissent coming from his tired thighs, and the front of his trachea. Until he’d put his feet down on the side of the bed, he’d forgotten about his scratched, raw soles. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he went on, inventively. 

He was in sweats, which he hadn’t ended his evening in. When he checked beneath the waistband, he wasn’t wearing any underpants. Arthur wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not to think of the sequence of events, that Eames must have had to worm off his jeans, seen that he wasn’t wearing underpants, and tucked him into sweatpants.

On second thought, of course he’d bypassed underpants. The backs of his thighs were a mess of welts, bruises and more than one open gash. It had been a kindness to him to put him in loose cotton.  

The whole night was a laundry-list of humiliations, and a new one presents itself as a candidate for his shame’s top priority every few minutes. His gorgeous roommate, demanding he not have the sort of sex that lead to him being in that sort of state. His roommate seeing his battered back, and the pale skin of the expanses of flesh that usually didn’t see the light of day. He couldn’t stop seeing Eames’s face in his mind, saying  _ you came home smelling like anxiety.  _ That was probably the worst part. It was one thing for Eames to disapprove of what kind of sex he was having. He could deal with that. But for Eames to know how he’d  _ felt  _ about it — that seemed unbearably private. 

As soon as he could bear to face the outside world, he was going to pop down the street, get himself a coffee with enough of a methamphetamine punch to kill an elephant, and he was going to go about making inquiries to find a new place to live. This whole stupid thing had gone on long enough. 

If nothing else, the resolve felt good. He felt hollow, scraped out, and a little defeated, but the fresh coat of paint over all of that was the fact that he’d decided to do something about it.

First, though, he was going to try to eek out another few hours of sleep, put the world on miserable hold for as long as possible. 

 

*

 

Of course, because Arthur’s life was a fucking cesspool of shitty sex with strangers and other miserable assorted moments, before he had a chance to drown himself in the sink, there was a knock on his door.

“No thank you,” he said, primly. 

The doorknob turned without his consent. “Hey,” Eames said from the doorway. He looked mostly human, but there was a fine wisp of golden hair down the back of his neck, and on the backs of his hands. “Sorry I had to go to work today.”

Arthur stared at him, and then the time on his phone. “Shouldn’t you be at work now?”

“I felt pretty sure you weren’t going to drop today, but I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

With a bravado, and frankly a nastiness, he didn’t feel, Arthur spat, “Oh, come off it.” 

Eames huffed a disbelieving laugh, forehead folding. “Well, good to see you’ve got the fighting spirit back.”

Arthur gave a shrug, lurching to his feet, and pushing past him in the doorway. “Sorry, no, I’m not, I just,” he said, and could see a rambling speech on the horizon, which was the downside of the wretched way he lived: he was so stupidly lonely that anytime someone said a word in his general direction, he was ready to overshare. Quite frankly, he was sick of it, sick of himself; it was probably time to kill that version of himself, set it out to sea and decide to be someone new. He tried to organize his thoughts into short sentences: “Something went wrong here. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong idea. I need you to stay out of my business.”

He was a little pleased with how those things came out, sharp and logical, less emotional frenzy and more cease and desist letter. 

He was patting himself on the back when Eames took hold of him, firmly with his fingertips digging into the swell of both shoulders as he held him still. “I can’t do that.”

“Yes,” Arthur said, trying to sneer, and his heart like a snare in his chest beating to a tempo that sounded like  _ be calm be calm be calm _ , and failing utterly miserably. “You can. Last night was hardly your concern.”

“Why do we feel like we’ve already gone over this?” Eames growled. 

Arthur went limp in his grip, feeling the tension crystallize in the room like a chemistry room full of broken beakers, glittering and more than a little dangerous. “Hey,” he said, trying for soothing. “Can you not go all alpha hulk on me right now?”

He opened his hands immediately, and Arthur slumped down. 

“I keep doing this all wrong,” Eames said, scowling. “Because you’re not… you’re just a human. Not like that!” he almost yelled, taking in Arthur’s reaction. “Fuck. I’m going to leave now.”

“Tell me what you meant first. About doing it wrong because of me being human.”

“Because I wouldn’t have to explain to pack.”

“Because I wouldn’t question your orders if I was in your pack,” Arthur says slowly, to clarify. 

“No. You’d just … understand.” Eames says, haltingly. He was still in his suit from work, a little more put together than he usually looked: crisp lines and for some inexplicable reason, a tie-pin, but he looked exhausted. 

“If there’s something you want to tell me,” Arthur says, and his voice was quiet because Eames was close enough that he could whisper if he wanted.

“If your nose was any less human, you’d just  _ know _ .”

“Alright. Well, that’s enough ambiguity for me,” Arthur says, sidling past, and felt inexplicably sad for brief moment, the emotion spiking in him like a struck match. He’s not sure where his life got so off the rails that this is part of it, making awkward, broken conversation with a roommate about how he can’t catch anyone’s attention unless he is letting then crack him open. And he’s not sure which is worse, that he hates it, or that counter-intuitively, he also craves it, a little. He can’t say any of this. 

“Okay,” Eames said, “here it is, then. If you need someone to hurt you, I need you to come to me.”

Arthur’s brain stops functioning because that’s. Well. 

“Because someone has to keep track of your pulse,” Eames says, and Arthur excuses himself, putting on his shoes by the door. 


	3. Chapter 3

Arthur runs for a long time, scratched feet twinging a little but not enough to discourage him. 

His mind flipped through flashes of topics like a rolodex, lingering on his own physical damage, already starting to fade in the cheer of the buttery afternoon light, to Eames coming home at lunch to check on him, Eames cleaning up his back, the fact that he needed a dog so he had to do this more often, lungs burning and calves starting to get sore, the man from the previous night being so uninterested in Arthur the minute he’d started to make conversation, and  _ oh hell  _ what would his poor mother think of how damaged he’d turned out as an adult, she’d tried so hard to do it on her own, and, the worst one, which kept flicking back to the forefront, not even a memory: Eames, Eames volunteering to hurt him, which was nothing and everything he wanted, nothing good for him and yet strangely compelling. 

Did he need to leave? He definitely needed to start making friends, that was for damn sure. He needed someone to soundboard for him. He’d had a friend in college, his first year, that he’d grown close to more rapidly than he had since or before, and if he’d kept in touch, she’d be his top choice right now to help him make an objective pro and con list. 

Since he seemed to be alone in this endeavor, he made one by himself as he kept running, having too much energy to even stop at crosswalks, and when he got to intersections that weren’t ready to give him the immediate right of way, simply turning to follow the sidewalk.  _ Pro:  _ he started,  _ super attracted to him,  _ and then, ruefully,  _ con: super attracted to him. Other cons: sex never ends well; someone will have to move afterward.  _

He had another thought, and he didn’t know what column it went into, and that was the fact that he could apparently use his shifter senses to keep track of his heartbeat and smell his anxiety, and if that wasn’t terrifying and intoxicating in equal measures, he didn’t know what was. 

Dry mouthed, he started taking stock of his surroundings so he could figure out which way was home. 

*

When he got home, he took a quick, barely-warm shower and did what he could to put a little bit of ointment on his back, pressing his fingers to sore spots he couldn’t see between his shoulder blades and back to get a feel for what sort of bruises they were. 

All the while, he kept having this pair of duplicitous thoughts: with half his brain, he thought, as he always did, afterwards:  _ I should never do that again,  _ and, overlapping, as if he was hearing two conversations happening in the same room:  _ I should go out again, tonight.  _

Now, of course, he had an added stomach-lurching layer of Eames trying to get involved where he hadn’t been invited, and all Arthur could think about was himself at Eames’s feet, maybe sore but at least at the center of his focus, a low uninhibited growl curling around him like steam. Arthur jerked off, confused and more than a little miserable at the awareness that his compartmentalized life, screwed-up as it was, was about to come tumbling down like a house of cards. 

*

At some point after Arthur went to sleep the previous night, Eames must have made a perfunctory sweep of the kitchen, because he can’t find the debris of broken plates, but drags out the cleaning supplies from under the sink anyways and gets to work on the kitchen, scrubbing the counters until his forearms burn and his brain feels as blank and calm as the polished tile. 

Of course he isn’t going to move out. 

He likes it here. His mail comes here and sometimes that mail is from his grandma who sends him five dollar bills one at a time. He buys sour straws and a four pack of cream sodas in glass bottles and takes a picture of himself with them and has it actually printed like that’s something people still do and she loves those. She keeps them on a tackboard above her desk. He doesn't want to ask his grandma to send his five dollar bills somewhere else. 

He’s all shook up because his roommate crossed some lines, tried to get involved in his private life, and because Arthur has got this ridiculous mixed up crush, which was a safe place to put all of his stupid, trembling feelings when he’d thought Eames was just straight, and gorgeous, and an alpha, and dangerous enough to remind Arthur that he could inevitably kick his ass if he ever made a move, which shoved Arthur comfortably into inactivity, because the aftermath of emotional intimacy has never in his life left him agreeing with the sentiment  _ better to have loved and lost.  _

But somewhere he lost the thread: let the fact that he’s shy and anxious crowd out the fact that he’s not a social pariah. 

Eames had done a piss poor job of being detail oriented: there are flecks of broken ceramic that he finds in the corner of the floor and the cabinets when he crouches down to swipe with a rag. 

After he finishes, the smell of lemon and disinfectant cleaners linger in the air, and he sits down in the living room to watch TV for an hour or two while he rests, stomach down on the sofa, one arm tucked up underneath himself. 

A rerun of an old sitcom plays while he dozes off, half annoyed by the canned laughter and smarmy disdain that TV couples seem to have for each other, but not annoyed enough to turn it off. 

When the front door opens, it occupies the same back-burner space that the TV does in his brain: a minor annoyance, but not enough to rouse him fully. He makes a half-articulated noise, mouth clumsy with sleep. 

“Just me,” he hears Eames say, and then the sound of his bulky keys going down on the table. Arthur refuses to open his eyes or acknowledge him further in any way, but Eames doesn’t need him to, because he comes all the way to him. 

“Can I see your back?” he asks. 

Arthur hears him, too close, and replies without opening his eyes: “Nope. Nice try though.”

Eames lets out a long breath. 

“What do I have to do to get out of your pack?” Arthur asks, giving up on both the hope of a nap and on an evening without interacting with Eames and finally sitting up to paw through the contents of the coffee table to find the remote. “Is there an exit exam I can take?” 

Eames winces. “It’s not like that.”

“Do I need to move?”

“It wouldn’t help.” 

“What do you mean  _ it wouldn’t help? _ ” Arthur says. “Do I need to perform a blood ritual or something?”

“You’re being dramatic. Taking everything the wrong way. I just … care about you. There’s no blood ritual to undo that.”

“Fucking shifters,” Arthur says.

“I’m sorry,” Eames says, looking humiliated, face flushing down to his neck. 

Funnily enough, that’s not what Arthur wanted at all, and feels a little like a jerk himself. He spends his whole life being a pushover with people who want to shred him, but he starts getting angry at now that he’s getting something else, and whatever ridiculous thing is going on with Eames, it’s obvious enough that he’s genuine. 

“I didn’t decide it; I just realized a few months in that I’m aware of you. Proximity. Your well being. I don’t think moving out is going to change that.” 

He’s too awkward and tense to be duplicitous, Arthur thinks, feeling something thick in his throat as he goes for the buttons on his shirt. 

Eames makes a small noise of surprise, eyes catching on him, wide and golden-green. “What are you...” he says. Eames is big all over: the breadth of his muscled chest and the swell of his shoulder, bicep, forearm defined with sloping topography, Arthur sees all of that in stark relief as he tenses beside him, has to swallow against the sight. 

“You’re so worried about me,” Arthur says, brave and terrified at the same time, “don’t get shy now.”

Eames watches and watches and eventually Arthur sets his shirt down on the floor and turns three quarters away from him. 

“Fuck,” Eames breathes. “It looks so much worse today.”

“It happens,” Arthur says, shrugging. “You’re an alpha. You must get in fights.”

“Not all that often. You’ve seen my pack. Maybe with strangers who want to encroach on them, but certainly not with someone I wanted to be intimate with.”

“Well. As you pointed out that first night, I bailed before it got to that.”

The apartment was quiet, then, aside from the hum of the fridge behind them. Eames, with his long blond eyelashes and wild hair, looks at his hands for a while. Arthur watches him, feels his attention drawn to the line of his throat, which has always looked strong but now seems strangely delicate. The bump of his adam’s apple trembles. “Will you tell me why?”

“Things were getting unpleasant. I panicked and ran.” 

Eames looked at his wrist, which was still a little bruised and cut up from where he’d wrenched his hand from the cuff. Arthur, embarrassed, covered it with his other hand. “Why didn’t you say,  _ hey asshole, stop that. _ ”

“It’s not as easy as it seems,” Arthur scoffed. 

Eames grabbed his wrist, right below where his own hand was covering the scuffed up skin beneath his hand. “It is.”

Arthur’s heart picked up speed. 

“Come on,” Eames said, “you told me to fuck off the other night.”

“That was different,” Arthur said, weakly, passive but tense in his grip. 

“How so?” Eames says. 

Arthur can’t bring himself to say it, isn’t even really sure how to articulate and not sound as poorly adjusted as he clearly is. If he says,  _ I trusted you not to break my face in,  _ it implies that the other night that could have been an option. 

“We weren’t having … it wasn’t the same situation.”

“We weren’t having sex, you mean? You can tell somebody to get lost except when sex is involved? Or just violence?” Arthur doesn’t answer, and Eames hauls him closer by his arm. “Imagine we are. Imagine I’m going to hurt you, and you don’t want me to. Tell me to stop.”

Arthur is suddenly faced with the same problem he always is, the fact that his nebulous pride goes missing in action when things get intense, that his backbone has wandered off and left him a sad kind of boneless. He’s also confronted with a problem less common: he doesn’t  _ know  _ if he wants Eames to stop. 

“Come on,” Eames says. He shakes his head back and forth. 

Eames doesn’t let up. He demands, “Tell me to stop.” 

And that’s easier, because following orders is something he’s knows much more about it. “Stop,” he says, no conviction but at least the words came out. Eames doesn’t so much drop his hand as he gives it back to him, gently, brushing his thumb over the nub of his wrist as he releases it. 

“Good,” he says, and then grabs his shoulder. “Again.”

“What is this,” Arthur scoffs, shrugging to get out of his grip, but Eames holds on. “Some kind of fucked up consent class?” 

Eames’s face is stony. “You clearly need one if it seems easier to leave someone’s house barefoot than to ask him to stop.”

Arthur said something with his face turned away. 

“Come again?” 

“He called me a child.”

“When you tried to stop?” Eames says, suddenly angry. 

“Not exactly,” Arthur explains. “Just, earlier. At the part where people usually ask me if I have any ground rules. And he was keen to get straight to business.”

“That didn’t seem like a red flag?”

“Of course it did,” Arthur snaps, flushing. “But I was there already.” 

“That settles it,” Eames says, and his fingertips dig into Arthur’s shoulder. “Get me to stop.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“No,” Eames says. “Shake me off. Punch me. You just told me that you couldn’t stop someone who thought you were  _ a child  _ for wanting to talk boundaries.” When Arthur stares without reacting, Eames drops his voice to a low register. “Start right here, easy and polite. Say: we need to take a break.”

That’s easy enough. Something in Arthur’s chest unlocks. “We need to take a break,” he parrots in a small voice. 

“Perfect,” Eames says, letting go of his bare shoulder. Arthur feels his eyes go wide, and the skin still warm where Eames’s hand was just before. The desire to hear him say it again lodges itself in Arthur’s ribs, sharp and complicated. 

Counter-intuitively, it seems like he will get to hear it if he formulates some version of  _ unhand me, philistine.  _ He thinks about this, standing up abruptly. “I’m just going to,” he says, stilted, and nods at his bedroom door. He doesn’t turn back. 

*

His back heals. 

It seems like a ridiculous thing to note. Arthur isn’t a socialite, but it wasn’t his first rodeo. He feels hyper aware, though, because of Eames’s concern. It also seems to change something between them, tip the balance from quiet roommates to something more like friends. 

One morning Eames makes an entire pot of coffee by accident, and brings him two mugs full, dressed in too much cream and sugar. 

“Who makes an entire pot of coffee by accident?” Arthur demands. 

“Well,” Eames says, bashful, “someone in the pack must be really, really thirsty. I looked

at the coffee maker this morning and thought I definitely need a whole pot, and it was already making by the time I realized what had happened.”

Arthur took a mug in each hand, taking a sip of both to decide if either of them actually tasted like coffee and found that the answer was a resounding no. He might as well have poured sugar into milk and heated it up. He set both down on his desk with a smile. “Thanks, man.”

“Anytime,” Eames said, and went to go get himself into a suit. He had some sort of boring sales job and he was always out the door by eight, so Arthur had very infrequently seen him in any sort of sleepwear. It made this particular morning feel weird, like he’d seen an x-ray of a cocoon. He filed away the image of Eames in a well-worn raglan and navy sweatpants, looking rumpled and warm, away for later. 

Midmorning, when he was comfortably seated in his own call center, between a call where he helped someone make a payment plan and another where he’d effectively let a little old lady rant about all of the shenanigans you could put on prime cable during family hour he shot Eames a text. 

Opening up his contact info reminded Arthur how limited their interactions had been. There were only eight text messages in the recent history, two of which were variations on a _ drunk af will you get the door fro me  _ sort of theme. Frowning, Arthur tapped out,  _ You can tell when one of your pack needs coffee? Anything else? _

He didn’t expect a response, or at least, not a quick one, but Eames must have already had his phone out, because the results were almost immediate.  _ Mostly physiological needs, but yeah.  _

_ Second hand hunger?  _ Arthur typed, feeling stupidly excited by the moment unfolding in real time.  _ Sounds like a bitch.  _

_ You don’t even know. Try being second-hand horny.  _

Arthur swallowed, and tucked away his phone. Nervously drumming his fingertips on his desk,  __ he went back to making phone calls with his other hand. 

At lunch, he looked at his phone, feeling bashful about the fact that he’d left Eames hanging. He had three new text messages, the most recent:  _ Shit.  _ and before that,  _ would you believe me if I said I meant to type literally anything else?  _ and that first one, after only a few minutes of Arthur’s silence:  _ sorry, forget I said that. _

_ Sorry,  _ Arthur finally sent back, his stomach in knots.  _ Had to take a call.  _

He put his phone away.


	4. Chapter 4

He got home first, most nights, because he refused to break up his day and Eames took long lunches. “Do you want to go in on a pizza with me,” he said, almost as soon as Eames opened the front door. He wanted Eames to know he didn’t want to continue their last interaction, but that he wasn’t angry at him.

Eames frowned, taking off his suit jacket. “I was going to go out with my pack, actually.”

“Oh,” Arthur said. “Okay.”

“I’d invite you out, but we’re going to be roughing it.”

“Roughing it,” he repeated.

“Yeah. We all live in the city and it’s hard to get a good stretch on two legs.”

That was it, Arthur nodding as Eames went to his room, emerging again in a little while in a tee shirt and worn jeans, looking rumpled and soft. The neck of his shirt looked a little stretched, slouching down his neck and giving Arthur a glance at the divot at the join of his collar bone. He could see the ink-stained skin of his thick arms, the bold edges of animals disappearing behind his cotton sleeves. 

“Have fun,” he said, feeling strangely disappointed.

*

With Eames gone for the weekend, Arthur reveled in the privacy and lack of tension in the apartment for a few hours, stripping down to his boxers not long after the door closed behind Arthur, waiting just long enough for him to turn back if he’d forgotten his car keys before he began his casual dress code lounge.

He tooled around on the internet for a few hours, manfully resisting the urge to do a full, obsessive search on the culture of shifters, even though he was dying to know if there was some sort of precedent for a human being an accidental member of an alpha’s pack. He’d started to make that search, once, early on in their living arrangement, but stopped for two reasons.

The first was that as he’d been trawling internet databases for information on shifters, purely for information, but the details had seemed strangely intimate and he’d felt like a voyeur reading insight into people’s lives that had no say in telling him themselves. He hadn’t repeated the experiment for a second reason: he’d discovered one day when he found the phrase _ostrich shifter missed connections_ in his phone’s search history that their google searches synced by sheer proximity.

That night he fell asleep to a movie playing on his computer in bed, in the ambiguous twilight hours, and it caught him unawares but left just as quickly, leaving him only with the wispy remnants of an electric dream. He woke up at half-past seven in the morning, his dick hard and insistent against his stomach. He was palming himself sleepily through his boxers without opening his eyes before he’d even had a chance to think about it, letting out a little content sigh when he finally curled his hand around himself.

He wasn’t far off; he’d woken up with a dry mouth and a throbbing, persistent arousal that had his internal organs in a vice grip, skittering low along his abdomen. He used his spare hand to rub absently from one hipbone to the other, and let his thoughts drowsily turn to the rise and fall of Eames’ voice _._

 _Try being second-hand horny,_ he’d sent, and Arthur had never heard him say the word out loud, but he had no trouble conjuring the sentence in his imagination in Eames’s low voice, accented differently depending on how he was feeling. Arthur, with some difficulty, tucked himself away, clenching his teeth hard enough to make his jaw cramp. He stared bleakly at the ceiling until all chance of going back to sleep fled and it was time to force himself up and into the day.

He spent Sunday cranky and tense, knowing that Monday was fast approaching to tie him back into his responsibilities without him having a chance to reset his brain.

Eames came home late on Sunday night, with one of them members of his pack in tow. Arthur knew this because he’d heard them talking to each other from the sidewalk through the open kitchen window, because their apartment was only on the second floor. When Eames came through the door, however, he came through alone.

He wanted to ask _where’s your friend?_ but he didn’t want to be intrusive if Eames had left him outside for a reason. There was a pizza box on the counter and dishes in the sink. Arthur busies himself with dealing with them as he hears Eames come in, feigning hyper-interest in the minutia of kitchen clutter.

“Hey love,” Eames says, and that’s when Arthur finally gives him his whole attention. Eames is practically glowing.

“Hey,” Arthur says, soapy hand half in a mug.

“You really missed out,” Eames says, going for the fridge and pulling out item after item, making a small mountain of sliced meats and bread and a whole jar of pickles.

“On starving all weekend,” Arthur says, archly, leaving out the obvious moment of _I wasn’t invited, dipshit._

“Naw mate,” Eames says, opening his mouth too wide to stuff half the fridge into it. “On not being human.”

Arthur stares at him in wonder. Eames always comes home from pack activities a little brighter, shinier, ravenous. Arthur looks his fill, unembarrassed while Eames devotes his attention so thoroughly to the fridge. “Not being human’s worked out okay for me so far, thanks,” Arthur says with a faint disgust, looking at the mustard point at the tip of Eames’s nose.

“Yeah, but you have ever wrestled a bear?”

“No,” Arthur muttered. “I skipped that day in my boy scout career.”

“You really,” Eames says, around a mouthful of something that could graciously be called a sandwich, perhaps by someone from an indigenous tribe who had never been to a _Subway_ before, “should try it sometime.” He paused for a minute, chewing with gusto. “Exhilarating.”

Arthur thinks about the fact that Eames had made it most of the way to the door with company and how he didn’t have any company now, and how a few minutes had passed. A little puzzled, he finally asks, “You staying in for the evening, or are you headed out again?”

“Oh, I’ve got to take Yusuf home,” Eames says, rinsing his hands in the sink and flicking the water away.

“Okay, yeah, I was wondering about that,” Arthur says, angling his head towards the kitchen window.

“I wanted him to meet you, actually, but he punked out on me.”

Arthur lost his grip on the dishes he was scrubbing and hand to fumble to catch it before it shattered in the sink. “Come again?” he squeaked.

Eames let out a quick bark of laughter. “Yeah, I know, right? But he’s, you know, been in a bit of a dry spell since his divorce, and he had a mini panic when he got here. He’s probably smoked half a pack of cigarettes since I left him down there.”

“What.”

“You can’t be serious,” Eames scoffed. “Nothing you haven’t heard before. I knew he was a little bit into you, so I tried to get him to come in and say hi.”

None of which made sense. Arthur frowned, feeling the lines of his expressive forehead scrunch up.

“Anyways,” Eames said, “I’ve got to give him a ride home. Maybe next time.”

“Next time,” Arthur echoed, dumbly, and Eames closed the door behind him.

*

The strange standoff in the house resumed. Arthur tried to keep down any semblance of arousal, and he and Eames kept a bit of distance, not unfriendly, but careful enough to poke into the kitchen at different times. Eames wore sweats and a shirt to pad sleepily around the house in the morning instead of his usual shirtlessness, and Arthur tried not to imagine him as he usually was, rippling golden skin and ink everywhere, almost ever member of his pack represented across the soft swell of tired muscles.

Arthur went to work and came home before Eames, and chewed his way through a book about the social hierarchy of manatees, started to watch a movie he’d downloaded and found it lackluster by act two, he went for a run and then another. And he very carefully kept his hands off his dick.

On thursday, Arthur woke up for work to a note on the fridge whiteboard: _pack meeting tonight._

Eames didn’t usually warn Arthur of that kind of thing, but maybe it was different now, maybe he’d prefer Arthur out of the house now, maybe things were supposed to be awkward because Eames had tried to set him up, unknown to him, and things hadn’t worked out, which was stupid. He hadn’t known something _might_ have happened, so of course he didn’t feel any sort of way now that it hadn’t.

Arthur erased the message on the board to let him know he’d received it, but he didn’t write anything back. Instead, he took a quick shower for work, perfunctory but thorough, and toweled through his hair aggressively before dressing for work, tucking something more appropriate for afterwards, and a bottle of tylenol from the medicine cabinet just in case, feeling grouchy and stressed from the soles of his feet to the dull heat of his dry eyes.

*

After work, Arthur packed himself up, and all of the tension he was carrying around like a concealed weapon: at the center of his own focus, heavy at the small of his back, but invisible to everyone else.

He found himself at a grimy club, looking for something to regret, and knocked back two shots off the bat to get a head start. He’d changed in his car, between work and sliding in through the back door. He’d worked until almost eight, just to keep himself busy, but he was here now, in a shirt with the top two buttons undone, his tie tugged loose and hanging low. If he’d accomplished what he meant to, he looked like someone looking for something rather specific.

He ordered a rum and coke tapped his fingertips on his thighs while he waited for it, nervous energy skittering up and down the length of him. He kept moving his leg restlessly, one foot resting on his knee and jerking up and down.

The smoke was giving him a headache by the time he finished his first drink, so he finished a second, trying to blur the edges.

His phone buzzed in his front pocket, and Arthur took a quick look at it before he shoved it face down on the bar. _Where are you?_ indeed. He finished another drink, and by then the club was starting to writhe, low lights swirling as people were finally starting to move, dance, warm up the place with their body heat. Arthur circled the rim of his glass, cool under his fingers, until someone stepped in close beside him.

“Hello there,” he said, and Arthur took a long look, squinting to keep the other man still.

“Hey,” Arthur said, still staring. The problem was, he couldn’t tell by looking at him if he was ready to give him what he needed. He looked big, but not that big, and tentatively friendly. If Arthur had met him a month ago, he might have said _If the Red Wings win in the shootout, I’m going to need a celebratory drink,_ or he might have asked him what he thought about trans-racial adoptions, because it was important not to be blindsided when people had stupid opinions.

Instead, he gave him a long dark look before inclining his head in an invitation to a conspiratorial huddle. “I’m not trying to be unfriendly,” Arthur said, feeling a little delayed, like there was a lag between his brain and his mouth, “but I’m not really looking for anything nice.”

“Oh,” the other man said, eyebrows jumping. “I’m not really sure I’m what you’re looking for, either.”

Arthur looked at the other man, darkly handsome with a narrow nose and thick expressive eyebrows. He looked like he built his own cabinets in his spare time, and Arthur could see the subtle bulk of his thighs through the dark wash of his jeans. “Are you sure,” he rasped, flicking his eyes up hopefully. “Haven’t you ever wanted to … take?”

The other man looked momentarily dazed by the words coming out of Arthur’s mouth before he shook himself. “Shit,” he said, squeezing his own pint glass hard enough to push the color out of his fingertips, “I’m a little old to help boys hate themselves in the morning.”

Arthur put his face against the sticky counter of the bar. “Alright,” he mumbled. “Thanks anyways.”

The other man put a heavy hand on his shoulder, and Arthur shuddered at the touch, provoking the other man to make a punched-out sound. “I’m Henry,” he said, leaning across Arthur’s back to speak into his ear. “I’ll be around if you think you can settle for something nice.”

“Henry,” he said, miserable, lifting his head. “I’m Arthur. I wish I’d met you a while ago.”

Henry looked doubtful. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” Arthur said, hating himself, “thanks.”

Henry tipped his head like an old fashioned cowboy and left him. Arthur signaled the bartender for another drink.

*

The evening unravels, dissolving under the constant current of gin.

He finds someone, because these things tend to work that way. He finds someone with firm, hard hands, and a glint in his eye. Arthur’s whole posture is one long question, inviting him to come hurt him.

By now his vision is underwater blurred but they seem to work out the details _alright, back to mine? No, I’ve got a roommate, but maybe... no._ The stranger tries to maneuver him into the bathroom, but how much can someone wreck him in a four by four cubicle? They get there and the other man, sharp-edged like he was looking for, shoves him to his knees and it moves all the swirling anxiety and doubt out of his head like a push-broom. He knows the dust will settle back inside of him after the whole thing is over, heavier than before, but for a few hours, this uneasy peace.

Time slows to a crawl, bruising fingers and the rough jostle of his mouth, pulled hair and the other guy saying, “That’s it, you little slut,” and Arthur thinks, _I can work with this,_ because at least he sounds a little pleased. He likes to work for it, but what’s the point if someone’s determined to make him feel like complete shit?

The other man, whose name is Jacob, holds his chin in a grip Arthur suspects will leave vivid marks on his skin. He is both for and against this, and drunk enough not to be able to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t really want to come home like the last time.

Arthur lets the other man hold him still, keeping his mouth open and wet, and some part of him blanks out: the radio static in his torso comes to a pause.

When Arthur is getting into it, the rhythm of breathing and blunt thump against his soft palate, a little bit of spit on his chin, eyes closed, Jacob stills him and then shoves him off, leaving Arthur to rock back into an open crouch, one hand behind him against the cold tile of the floor to keep his balance. “Here,” Jacob says, hauling him up by his arm, and fumbling around in the inside pocket of his jacket. He produces a lumpy packet.

A blank second passes, before his retreated higher facilitated resurface with alarm. “Mother _fuck,_ ” he grinds, looking at the ceiling as he hears Jacob shake out four loose pills. His options sprawl in both directions before him, and he’s already drunk, it would be so easy to give in, because he hates to upset people, and because the curve of Jacob’s bicep makes him hungry, and he feels like he hasn’t gotten off properly in weeks, not since before his terrible run in with the last guy that he tried to get a little messy with, and this is turning into a pattern.

Arthur is very, very tired of almost finding what he’s looking for, and not getting anything like what he wants. He swallows down all of the voices telling him that it might not hurt, just this once, to see something through to the end instead of flinching. Because, _fuck,_  “I just want someone to fuck me without trying to fuck me up, not fuck up my whole life,” he snarls, backing up forcefully enough that he hits the stall door behind him, elbow-first. “Fuck.”

“You don’t have to,” Jacob says, and for what it’s worth, he does look contrite as he hastens to drop two of the pills back into his supply and tucks the whole thing into his coat pocket.

Hazy, Arthur edges back again, careful this time not to slam himself against the wall. “Sorry,” he says, wiping at his face with the back of his hand. “Sorry, I just — sorry,” and stumbles back into the club.

“Sorry,” he keeps saying, under his breath, muttering and trying to get to the front door, disoriented even before stepping back into the shiny darkness of the main room.

“What are you sorry for,” someone says into his ear, an open palm at his elbow, and Arthur lurches away on instinct before his senses catch up with his brain, sorting the voice into place in his brain.

“Eames!” Arthur yelps. “What are you doing here?”

Eames leans in close to respond his his ear, but the club music picks up at the same time, turning to whole answer into a ticklish vibration along his ear canal. Arthur swipes at the side of his head, in lieu of being able to actually scratch his brain.

Eames takes him by the elbow, steering him through the crush of bodies with minimal effort, steering people out of their way with his other hand, parting the crowd like a professional.

In the street, close enough to the club that they were still in the boundary where the sound could spill out into, Eames let him go.

“What are you doing here,” Arthur repeats, tongue heavy.

“Collecting your sorry arse,” Eames says, sharp, but the line of his mouth is soft. The light coming from the sign above the club and the single grimy streetlamp above is hardly enough to see every detail of his expression, but Arthur is almost glad for it. He stumbles behind him following blindly until he catches sight of Eames’s car, clumsily situating himself into the passenger seat.

It takes Eames a while to speak, driving silently, whipcord forearms tense and fingers thrumming restlessly. Ten minutes into the drive, he fails to signal two lane changes in a row, and then says, “I know you didn’t need me here.”

“But you came.” Arthur ventures, confused, feeling like with every mile that they crossed, he moved further from _completely trashed_ and closer to being painfully hungover.

“I came here,” Eames repeated. “Because I am an idiot.”

“Me too,” Arthur mumbled, trying to work the crank on the side of his seat so he could pretend to fall asleep or be dead and subsequently get out of this conversation.

“Here’s what I don’t get. You’re looking for something. To be honest, it seems a little indiscriminate. And what you get out of it seems to be a mixed bag.”

Arthur’s seat stubbornly refuses to go down. “I’m just looking for the same thing everyone else is,” he grumbles, putting his head in his hands. He can feel the bees in his skull through the skin of his palms.

“You’re not, though,” Eames dissents gently. “Not at all,” and as far as Arthur is concerned, that’s the end of the night.

*

Waking up embarrassed about the night before is becoming an established fact in his life. Waking up next to Eames has not, so far, become anything of the sort.

“What,” Arthur says, voice sleep smudged and raspy, “the hell.”

“Shhh,” Eames says without opening his eyes “I’m not getting off the boat.”

Arthur is too tired for this shit, and his head is already killing him. “There is no boat. Just my bed. Why are you in my bed?”

“I’m not,” Eames says, curling to press his face to the mattress, giving Arthur the perfect view of the back of his neck, sun golden and, Arthur can only assume, sleep warm. He tells himself that it wouldn’t be appropriate to touch it to check, regardless of the fact that they seem to be sharing a bed. His heart thumps unevenly in his chest as he pushes himself to the side of the bed, looking down speculatively.

He feels unpleasantly boneless, in a _half-rotten organic trash_ and not a _supinely post coital_ sort of way, and comes off the side into a heap, dragging his comforter off the side. “Hey,” Eames protests feebly.

“This cannot be happening,” Arthur mutters darkly, and tries to keep his head level as he practically scoots to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker.

He’s sitting on the floor with a mug under his face, sipping tentatively through one of the coffee stir straws when Eames ambles in, who — bastard — does not look like he came through the shredder like Arthur knows he does. He gives him the briefest of gazes to figure that out before he goes back to his coffee.

“What are you doing down there?” Eames says, and Arthur doesn’t have to look at him to know he’s smirking.

“Gravity,” he explains, putting the hot ceramic of his mug against his neck. “Extra elastic today.”

Eames looks at him with his head cocked to the side before getting himself a glass of water, filling it at the tap and settling down next to him, long legs crossing at the ankles. Arthur pulls his eyes away from the soft-looking folds of his sweatpants.

“We’re not going to have to talk about it, are we?” Arthur says, like it’s a joke, like he didn’t get a thing he’s wanted for a long time, and miss it by drunkenly blinking. Once chance and he’s got no idea: a hazy hole where his most cherished memory of late should sit.

“No,” Eames says, “not if you don’t want to.” Eames’s fingertips drum on the line of his own clothed thigh, restless, and Arthur takes a long drag of his coffee, unsure.

“Okay,” he agrees. He fumbles for his phone out of habit, an easy way to look busy and avoid eye contact before realizing he has no idea where it is. “Do you have—?”

“Yeah,” Eames says, and then immediately: “I mean, no, but I did at one point. I know it made it in the house.”

At the same time that Arthur goes to say, “Can you call it?” Eames opens his mouth to huff: “I know we aren’t going to talk about—”

Eames cuts himself off, embarrassed, and pushes himself to his feet. “Yeah, don’t worry about it,” he says, rubbing his hand along the back of his neck, briskly.

Eames is out of his sight soon, and Arthur is relieved, and sad, because he’s clearly come to the end of his ability to sort through his own emotions. “You’re such a trash bag,” he groans at himself.

“What,” Eames calls out from his room, where he’s hopefully finding Arthur’s phone hearty and whole.

“Nothing!” he says, sharp, and puts his head in his hands. By the time Eames returns, two phones in one hand and sweats low on his hips, Arthur’s arranged some of his thoughts. “Thanks,” he says, but then, because one time, he’d moved in by himself, miserable and slumped and Eames had taken his duffel from him at the door, and because another time he’d told him about their shared favorite book and it had felt like there was the maybe of something else, and Arthur hadn’t been brave enough to ask for it. And a little because someone had offered him something nice last night and he hadn’t known how to take it, and he’s so tired of being hungry, and makeshift: “Did you leave your own party last night?”

Eames cuts his eyes at Arthur in a way that seems distinctly feline, calculating and sly, but eventually his answer sounds paradoxically earnest. “Of course I did.”

Arthur wants to know why. It must be written across his face, because Eames continues: “Your friend Henry called me.”

“What.”

“Said you’d left your phone at the bar and he didn’t know where you’d gone, but that you seemed a little unhinged.”

“Oh,” Arthur says in a small voice.

“Imagine how I had to try to tell him that you’re always a little unhinged, lately.”

Arthur winced, feeling like someone had just pushed two fingers into a bruise, leaving behind a sharp, quick pang.

“I’m not trying to be nasty. The guy you met at the bar last night, called the last number you’d text. Said you looked like a miserable mess and too drunk to let sketchy leather daddies tug you into the men’s room.”

Which is so much worse than anything Arthur could have imagined, worse than his half formed suspicion of Eames following some weird sixth sense to him, or something out of the animal kingdom, following his path like a migration instinct.

“Fuck,” Arthur sighs.

“Listen,” Eames says, “I know I’ve been really out of line. I don’t know who I’ve been for a couple days. It’s none of my business who you have sex with, or how you have sex.”

“I feel like we’ve reached this conclusion before.”

“We have. But it’s been hard. Every time I think I’m over this weird stupid thing, the universe punches me in the dick, again.”

Since they’ve already opened up this can of worms, Arthur takes a breath through his nose. “Last night, did you and I—”

“Of course not,” Eames snaps, body drawing into a tense line. “Fuck you. I came to make sure you were okay, not to take advantage of you when you were knocked off your head.”

“Okay,” he says, climbing to his feet, not rising to Eames’ level of thrashing anger. “I didn’t mean… it wouldn’t have been..”

“Yes it would have. You couldn’t even figure out how to get yourself out of your seat  belt when we finally got home.”

“How embarrassing,” Arthur says dryly, as if he hasn’t already forfeited all right to his dignity this month.

“Not so much,” Eames says, really looking at him. Arthur feels like a mason jar: whatever Eames is looking at his below the surface. He wishes he knew what Eames was seeing, wishes it weren’t so obvious that he’s hollow inside. “I’m the one who should be embarrassed. When these things happen the alpha in my brain just snaps. I’m hardly even thinking: it’s all animal instinct.”

“Your animal instinct is to come find me,” Arthur says, slow, just to check, “and then take me home and tuck me into bed and crawl in beside me without getting me naked.”

“That seems to be the case, yes,” Eames says, the low curl of his rueful voice swooping through Arthur like a breeze. He shivers, feeling like someone has blown on his vital organs.

“But. You wanted to fix me up. Why did you want to fix me up?”

“Because I thought it might keep you safe. Safer, I mean, because he'd do his fucking due diligence. And keep me out of the way. Yusuf's a good friend, a good man.”

“You’re,” Arthur says, and swallows, “you’re a good friend, too.”

Eames scratches the back of his neck. “Not like that.”

“It kind of sounds _like that,_ ” Arthur continues, raising an eyebrow.

“It does _,_ doesn't it?” Eames says, a little wonderingly and a little sad. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think this chapter is perfect, but I'm tired of wretling with it, and I know I've been busy with school, and I didn't want everyone to be left hanging at a low point forever.

Arthur is going to give himself another ten seconds to leave his head in his ass. 

Eames cares about him. Eames lives with him. Eames likes reading about cults and terraforming. It's not like he  _ doesn't know.  _

_ Four. Five. Six. _

He's got the chance now to take back what he's said, clarify. Arthur doesn't want to take that from him, or maybe he's just a coward. 

_ Eight, nine.  _

He takes Eames’ hand, tentative. Eames turns his head, eyes startled. Arthur leans back, the kitchen cabinets uncomfortably behind his back, but no real annoyance against the fact that Eames hasn’t stumbled over himself to say  _ no, that's not what I was offering.  _

“Last night,” Arthur croaks. There's gravel in his throat. “You warned me because you wanted me to stay.” He’s not sure if it’s a question or not. 

Eames nods. “Something like that.” 

“I took it wrong,” he says. 

Eames is bigger than Arthur in almost every way, taller by a little and broader by a lot, but suddenly his hand feels small in Arthur’s when Arthur brings up a second hand to curl around his knuckles in a soft hold. “I’m sorry I can’t seem to stop invading your privacy.”

“You haven’t been wrong,” Arthur tells him. “I’d be more angry if I ever got what I wanted when I hook up.”

Eames’ eyes are searching, but he doesn’t say anything. Arthur can feel the small blip of Eames’ pulse at his wrist through one fingertip. It’s funny, Arthur forgets that shifter or not, he’s only a man, bleeds red. Finally, he licks his lips, before he asks, “What do you want?”

Arthur closes his eyes against his rising humiliation. “Someone’s full attention, mostly.” 

“I can’t imagine that’s hard for you,” Eames says, “You’re — well, you don’t need me to tell you that you’re fucking gorgeous.”

“It’s not hard to get people to look at me,” Arthur says, unsure of how to explain. Nothing about his sexual history is gossip-worthy, but if he can help it, he’d like to keep Eames from finding him any more pathetic than he does currently. 

The tension in the air is unbearable, pulls his spine tight. 

“Which part is hard, then?” Eames whispers. 

“The rest of it,” Arthur says. 

Eames makes a motion like he’s trying to get his hand back and Arthur drops it. He feels like maybe he should apologize for — whatever he’s done wrong, but instead, Eames puts his arm around him, draped across his shoulders, and pulling him in close. The bulk of his arm is substantial, grounding. Arthur can almost  _ feel  _ his heart rate slow down. 

“I want you to have everything.” Eames tells him. “You deserve someone who will see it through.” 

Arthur has to close his eyes.

There are things Arthur wants, and tangentially, there are things that happen to him because he lets them happen. The fact that Eames knows all of that, and can detect his biochemical signals and his heart rate on top of everything — it feels a bit like he’s handed him a loaded weapon.

Arthur — Arthur has made worse choices, given men power over him in some desperate, searching effort to grab at something that might even temporarily unlock the tension between his shoulders. None of them have ever left him in surplus. Eames has pointed that out unerringly these past few weeks.

“When you imagine me with everything,” Arthur says, timid, and pauses. He is tucked against Eames’ side, could turn and speak directly into the skin of his neck if he wanted to. It is easier to angle away from him, so that he doesn’t have to see his reaction when he speaks. “Are you the one who gives it to me?”

“When I do,” Eames says, rueful. He’s so fucking warm, Arthur can feel it, even though he can’t seem to still a trembling that happens deep in his muscles, like an underwater earthquake, despite the radiant warmth, “it feels stupidly hopeful.”

It seems like answer enough for Arthur. He turns his face, close to Eames — almost nose to nose with him. He breathes in through his mouth, lips parted. He’s so close that Eames is briefly out of focus, a mosaic of blurred skin and eyebrows.

“You think about it,” Arthur says. He wants to be — more than clear.

Eames makes a pained noise. “I would think that I’d been profoundly obvious on that front.”

Arthur feels half tempted to give himself another ten seconds, but hasn’t he wasted enough time?

“Eames,” he says. It feels honest in his mouth. Arthur tilts his head up, there can be no mistaking his meaning.  

“I’m here,” Eames says. Arthur can feel the vibrations of his voice, with his accent that seems to change with his whims. Eames leans down and touches his mouth to Arthur’s, and it feels like something a long time coming, like a package from a friend across the ocean, landing at his doorstep.

Arthur tries to tie himself down to the moment. His heart whirs out of control, and he knows Eames can probably hear it, or feel it, or suss it out with extra sensory perception, and that just trips it off faster.

Arthur still hasn’t stopped shivering.

“No one takes care of you,” Eames says, eyes blown wide, his gorgeous asymmetrical mouth still practically on top of Arthur's.

“You keep  _ talking  _ about it,” Arthur says. “Why don't you fucking  _ do something  _ about it.”

Eames palms the side of Arthur’s face. “Alright,” he says, warm and close.

The next kiss is different, tilting and sweetly thorough. Eames’ hands move, making slow migrations, but never stray anywhere provocative.

“We’re still on the kitchen floor,” Arthur says.

“Come on then,” Eames says, lunging up with one seemingly effortless lunge and reaching down to pull Arthur up.

“Not so fast,” Arthur says, too late.

Eames chuckles. “Still hungover?”

“Like a bitch,” Arthur says.

“Let me tuck you in,” Eames says. He might be teasing, but after everything, Arthur doesn't think he is.

*

Arthur's bed isn't warm anymore, but he keeps a plush blanket that gets there quickly. He lets himself be pleasantly manhandled to it.

“Let me take this off,” Eames says.

Arthur is faced with a momentary dilemma because on one hand, he imagines it — Eames calloused hands on him, exploring his body with the same fine-toothed comb focus as he employs during kisses — and on the other.

Well. If he's ever going to be intimate with Eames, he's going to know eventually. Actually, he's seen him without a shirt, although Eames focus was on his flayed back at the time.

“My body is,” he starts, faltering.  _ Kind of fucked up,  _ isn’t an attractive way to finish that sentence, but it’s true. Eames keeps looking at him, waiting for the other half of what he’s trying to say, but he can’t, so instead he lifts his hands above his head instead and lets Eames peel off his shirt like a child.

Eames takes off his shirt, slow, and then doesn’t say anything. “I like your body,” he says, finally, “when it is with my body.”

That’s not it, exactly, but Arthur doesn’t want to call Eames on a misquote — he just wants to revel for a moment in the fact that Eames has seen his bruised elbows and the spots on his arm where he presses his knuckle in until he bruises, might have even noticed his older scars, and thought of poetry.

Eames comes up behind him, scoops him to his chest.

“It’s different,” Arthur says.

“What is?” Eames asks. Arthur can feel his words on the back of his neck and has to quell a quiet groan, and then keep himself from asking Eames not to stop right after that.

“Being… awake for this. Able to enjoy it.”

“Enjoy it,” Eames says, and nuzzles into his back. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry guys! I wanted to finish this in one chapter but I also REALLY wanted to update tonight. So I resolved a thing or two but the boys aren't done! Soon!!

Arthur is stupidly human. He wakes slowly, cracking one eye to look at Eames around noon. Eames is already awake, of course. Eames is glad to note that Arthur’s scent doesn’t change when he realizes where he is, and remembers the events of their kitchen meeting, like he isn’t overcome with immediate regret. That’s a step.

“Good morning,” Eames rumbles, and Arthur takes that final step into wakefulness, opening both eyes. His gaze slides down, Eames can feel it down the side of his face and then his neck.

“That looks soft,” Arthur says.

Eames can only assume he means the fur on the back of his neck. “You can touch it if you like,” he says.

Arthur reaches out with the hand that isn’t tucked under him and strokes softly at the nape of Eames’ neck, his fingers combing through the base of the fluff. Eames feels his hands splay even though they look human at the moment, unfurred skin and fingernails. “When I sleep,” Eames explains, “I’m not really in charge of the shift. It can get a little blurry.”

“I do always see you kind of half-lion in the morning,” Arthur agrees. He’s still petting Eames, there is no other word for it. “I wasn’t sure if that was preference.”

Arthur’s mouth is still soft with sleep. In a few hours, he’ll have himself schooled into something more severe, not quite a scowl, but nothing like him, now. Eames had misinterpreted that expression early on, that there was intent behind it, when really, Arthur had just been tense in a new city. Lonely, Eames knows now, unbearably so.

By the time Eames had sorted that out, the two of them had fallen into the habit of giving each other a wide berth.

Now, though, Eames is beginning to purr under the methodical sweep of Arthur’s hand on his neck, lengthening his stroke with each pass until he is rubbing the length of Eames’ back. Eames is ready to start making up for lost time.

“I worry —” Arthur says, brow knitting together, “that this isn’t a good idea.”

Eames’ first impulse is to guess — _because we live together, because you’re embarrassed by why I know_ — but realizes before he starts that he doesn’t need to give Arthur _more reasons_ for whatever list he’s keeping. There are always lists in the flat. “I disagree,” Eames says, still sprawled, his outside arm flung across the bed. “But if you think so … I think I’ve proven to both of us that I’m incapable of not meddling in your affairs, so I should probably move out.”

“I don’t want to back out,” Arthur says.

“Well. Let’s talk about the reservations you have,” Eames says, not sure what to expect. His relationships previously have never been this difficult to get started, never with so much _stop_ and _go_ and _sidestep_ and _retreat a few paces._ He’s always dived headfirst into something new, and never with a human. The sheer amount of non-intuitive _talk_ required boggles Eames’ mind. And yet, here he is.

“I tend to fuck these things up,” Arthur says.

“Relationships?” Eames clarifies.

Arthur nods.

“Have you been in one since you moved in with me?” Eames asks, a little startled.

“No,” Arthur admits. “The fuck-up tends to happen before that point.”

Eames pushes himself up so he can look at Arthur head-on, surprised into laughter. “You’re not talking about relationships. You’re talking about sex with losers not working out.”

Eames can see the immediate reaction in Arthur’s eyes, almost defensive. “You didn’t think any of these shady encounters would lead to something, did you?”

Arthur is climbing onto his elbows and then sitting up as well so that he can sit with Eames. His hair is — it looks ridiculous. Eames palms a few wayward strands down. “In an idea world, one of them might have turned into something. Statistically speaking.”

“You should have just made a FetLife account,” Eames informs him. “You know, _young fit twink looking for someone to give fun spanking without trying to make him feel like shit.”_

“That’s stupid,” Arthur says, but his pupils dilate. Eames can sense the warm beat of his heart speed up.

“Getting warmer,” Eames says, voice low and curling. He takes his hand and touches Arthur’s hand. “I think a lot of what felt fucked up about most of the stuff in your past was the lack of communication. You don't just eye up an intense stranger and then take him home if you've got specific needs.”

Arthur makes a dismissive noise. “I don’t have _specific needs._ You’re making me sound like a poorly maintained engine.”

“No,” Eames says, reaching for his hand. “That’s not what I mean. But things like that… when sex gets complicated, even if it’s awkward, what you need is more clarity, not less.”

“It's not any fun to start telling people who like doing what they want that they can't do what they want,” Arthur says, looking at Eames like he's being unreasonably stupid. He looks sly, suddenly. “Which is probably the upshot of having sex with someone who can basically read minds.”

“Not a perk,” Eames says. “If you think I'm going to let you out of telling me what makes you uncomfortable, you’re in for a terrible shock.”

Arthur groans and hides his face in his pillow. “What a waste of talent.”

“We can start small,” Eames says. “There are things that don’t have to be discussed at length...” Eames pauses, thinking. “Assuming, that is, that you’re interested in that sort of thing.”

Arthur puts the pillow back down. “What do you mean?”

Eames laughs awkwardly. “I meant we could make out.”

He thinks for a minute that Arthur is going to be derisive, or rude, or dismissive. Things have been so touch and go all year, with Eames wanting and Arthur off on consecutive quests to find something that felt right, and then there was the crest and fall of emotions Eames went though every time Arthur came home angry and disappointed and literally battered and still wasn’t interested in him. That’s, maybe, coming to a close now. If it isn’t, Eames will have to close this chapter of his life and move back in with Yusuf, commute be damned.

Arthur isn’t any of those things.

“Are you sure that’s all you can be persuaded to do?” he asks, finally.

“No,” Eames says. “There’s lots more to come. But until you’re ready to define your own boundaries, and until we've talked to each other about what we want and need, we're not going to be having sex with the kind of dynamic you're looking for.”

“Alright,” Arthur says, ducking his head. “But I’ve had a pretty grimy twenty four hours. I really need to take a shower and get my head on.”

“By all means,” Eames says, leaving back.

While Arthur is in the shower, Eames flips through the book on his dresser, back dust cover marking a page near the back. When he’s not reading fiction, he tends to carry books that look like this: short, pithy titles and minimalist covers. Eames pages through _Blink_ until he gets bored and sets it aside.

He can hear the water running, and strains to hear any sounds past that before he realizes he’s acting too creepy. He can do that with his pack, because of the reciprocity possible there. Arthur can’t sense him beyond his human sensory threshold, can’t listen for him in return if the fancy strikes.

When Arthur comes back, a little damp but not dripping, hair curling at the nape of his neck, towel around his waist, Eames is back to reclining, hands behind his head. He'd made the bed while Arthur was in the shower, so he's stretched out across the smooth expanse of Arthur's comforter now. It is a simple pleasure.

Arthur holds himself carefully. Still shy about his body, probably. Eames had had to bite his tongue about it last night.

Some of the state he's in can probably be attributed to some kind of play with other people, but most of it is under his own hand.

Which it's not like he can condemn, because if Arthur enjoys the double edged sword of pain and the euphoric endorphin rush it leaves behind —shit, he might even help him with that at one point if Arthur can ever bring himself to tell him what he's comfortable with — he's not really in a place to tell him that he shouldn't do that.

It's Arthur's own embarrassment that makes Eames feel a tight, uncomfortable feeling in his chest. If all of that made him feel good, if it added to his life, would he be embarrassed of it? He knows that Arthur's encounters tend to leave something to be desired, but he doesn't know which part.

“You look all buffed and scrubbed,” Eames says, keeping his voice light.

“I feel so much better,” Arthur nods.

“Hangovers are practically water soluble,” Eames says as Arthur rifles through his own drawers, pulling on his boxer briefs under his towel and dropping it. The way it clings to his damp skin is visually delicious.

“I thought about something while I was in there.” He threads himself into a t-shirt, looking soft and worn with age.

“Do tell.”

“You know more about me than I do about you. Or at least about sex with me.”

Eames raises his eyebrows. “You want me to even the playing field?”

“I just thought maybe we could talk before you make me provide you with an itemized list.”

Eames spreads his hands. “I'm an open book.”

“I don't really know where to start,” Arthur admits.

“An overview, then,” Eames says. He isn't the kind of person that doesn't know what to say about himself — he inhabits the space inside himself every hour. He is the foremost expert on the topic. “I tend to get into relationships with other shifters, mostly in my pack. It's easier that way and there aren't always hard feelings at the end. There's a natural ease when you're both in tune to the others emotions that makes a growing attraction uncomplicated and waning interest or building frustrations clear in the same way.”

“Okay. Is that important to you? I mean. Are we going to run into a problem sexually because I don't turn into a panther?”

Eames chuckles. “Come here,” he says, instead of answering his question. He guides Arthur to him, steers him to his own lap and gets him close. “This is how we fit.”

“Yeah, but with your pack,” Arthur says. From his place straddling Eames’ lap, he is very close. Eames can see a bruise on his shoulder and slowly puts a tentative nose to it. Arthur inhales sharply.

“I have never dated a shifter whose shift would have been compatable in bed,” he explains. “A pelican, a turtle, and a possum shifter. I might have shared affection in that form, had they been a little closer in the animal kingdom.”

“Is that your whole laundry list?”

“Of relationships, yes. A few more sexual partners, but I tend to like to be mates with someone. I don’t have sex with strangers”

“Okay,” Arthur says. He puts his hands on Eames’ shoulders. “I don't want you to feel like you're getting the third degree. But I want to ask you one thing.”

Eames gives him a baleful _go ahead_ look. “Do you have dynamic sex?” Arthur asks, coloring a bit.

Before he answers, Eames spends a second languishing in the heat from Arthur’s face. He pecks a kiss high to the crest of the flushed skin there. “It’s not the primary tool in my repertoire, but I have done, yes.”

“In what way?”

“Well. I was in one relationship where I was domming somewhat frequently, and then a few months ago I subbed for Yusuf.”

“What?” Arthur says, shocked.

“Well. I was going to try to fix him up with you. I couldn’t do that without making sure he was...”

“You test drove Yusuf,” Arthur says, grinning.

“It sounds weird when you put it like that.”

“I think it sounds kind of sweet. What were you trying to make sure of?” Arthur asks.

Eames lifts one shoulder. “There’s something that appeals to you, or you wouldn’t keep searching for it, but you come home so sad. I wanted to make sure he’d take care of how you felt before he let you wander off. Tuck you back into your clothes, wash your hair. I don’t know.”

Arthur’s heart picks up again. Eames can hear it, but as a route to experience it, that falls secondary to the fact that Arthur’s chest is so close to his that he can feel it through his own chest. Eames is torn between being swept up in Arthur’s arousal, gaining momentum with him, and being angry that a description of something so simple would stir up Arthur’s blood.

“Do you want to — ” Arthur says.

“Yes,” Eames says. He leans in to kiss Arthur, slotting together imperfectly before Eames finds the right angle. Arthur’s eyelashes flutter closed, hands sliding clumsily down Eames’ sides in his eagerness to touch his skin. Eames feels his fingertips at the sides of his hips, under his shirt.

Arthur shifts while they kiss, and Eames can feel the hard line of his dick through his underwear. Arthur makes a noise against Eames’ mouth when he drags his knuckles across Arthur’s clothed erection, fingernails biting into Eames’ sides. “Sorry,” Arthur gasps, letting him go.

“You’re — fine,” Eames says. “More than.”

Eames leaves Arthur’s mouth, holding him steady, one hand at the small of his back and the other curled around a thigh, as he noses down, leaving feverish kisses on Arthur’s jaw, neck, Arthur arching to give him access, and grinding heavy in his lap. Eames’ own cock gives an eager jump every time he moves.

Eames slides his teeth against Arthur’s neck, grazing.

“You,” Arthur gasps, “you should do that.”

“Do what?” Eames teases, still using the same careful slide.

“You should bite me,” Arthur says.

“Mmm,” Eames hesitates into Arthur’s neck, the hand that started on the outside of his thigh migrating inward, thumb dragging against warm grey cotton. “First — tell me something you don’t want.”

Arthur opens his mouth, hesitates.

“Tell me somewhere you’d rather I not bite,” Eames prompts, “or tell me not to break the skin.”

Arthur rocks down into him like he’s going to distract him, and, to be clear, it isn’t the worst tactic. Eames hips stutter to meet him with delicious friction, but then he reminds him. “If you want something, I want you to have it. But I have to make sure you can tell me what you _don’t_ want, if it comes to that. For instance. Can I bite your face?”

Arthur’s eyes widen fractionally before he schools his expression. “Sure,” he says.

Eames squeezes his shoulder. “See. That’s why — fuck, Arthur.”

“No,” Arthur says. Eames looks at his face, waiting for him to continue. “No I don’t want you to leave a bite mark somewhere visible. And I don’t really want to be, you know, completely gnawed on, but I do like getting bitten in between kisses.”

“See,” Eames says, grinning, and putting his palms on either side of Arthur’s face, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Eames kisses him for another few minutes, until his heart stops racing. It’s terrifying, actually, because Eames is worried about him. Part of him wants to know how the fuck did he get so wound up that it makes him anxious to say _I’d prefer it if you didn’t bite me on the face._

Eames can’t go back, though. He can only go forward, reinforcing positive improvement, being a source of comfort. He moves them so that Arthur is on his back and wrangles his t shirt off, sucking a line of kisses across his collar, stopping on one side to deliver a quick nip. Arthur makes the softest little moan, so Eames presses his mouth against it a few times soothingly before trying it again about an inch to the right. Arthur’s hips buck up under him. He can see the temporary indent of his own crooked bite, and he feels the wicked thrill of it low in his gut like a tight coil of pleasure.

Eames hums his approval, tweaking a nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Arthur’s hands grip the bottom of Eames’ own shirt and pull it over his head. Eames presses him down, all that skin against skin and Eames’ bulky thigh wedged between Arthur’s legs, Arthur writing down onto him and Eames so hard he feels lightheaded.

“What — do you want?” Arthur asks.

Eames likes to get tested with a new partner, pretty much every time. Before that, he doesn’t really like going beyond hands, just out of personal preference and a touch of paranoia. He probably should have articulated that before they started. “Let’s get these off,” Eames suggests, putting his thumb in the warm hollow besides Arthur’s hipbone. As soon as he’s aware of the little dent, he wants to put his mouth on it.

Eames is not in the habit of denying himself what he wants in bed if what he wants doesn’t encroach on someone else, so he ducks his head down to seal his mouth around the nub of bone there, looking up to make eye contact at Arthur.

“This is really, really great,” Arthur says, haltingly, twisting his hands in the sheets. Eames can feel his thigh flex beneath him.

“Good,” Eames says, working Arthur’s underpants off and depositing them beside the bed before he goes for his own.

“Let me help,” Arthur says.

Eames eventually gets them back down, head to toe, skin on skin, and the slick slide of it is delicious. Arthur’s hair has dried a little wild by then, and he’s handsome and sweaty and Eames thinks he’s enjoying himself. Eames gets a palm around the both of them, after a little relocating and settling on Arthur’s hand lotion, relishing the texture of their sliding cocks and the soft heat between their bodies, the way Arthur arches when he’s getting close, the scent of his arousal heady in the air.

Afterwards, Eames cleans them both up and fetches Arthur’s underpants, feeds him back in one leg at a time. Arthur blinks at him with sleepy eyes. “Is that something I should do for you?” he muses.

“No,” Eames says. “If you don’t mind, I’ll probably shift pretty soon to nap with you.”

“I don’t mind,” Arthur says. Eames sits up next to him for a while, still touching. He rubs his thumb along the places he nipped, but most of them have all but disappeared. He touches places Arthur has bruised himself with absent, careful fingertips. With Arthur’s eyes closed, Eames would suspect he’s begun to drift off, except that by the time Eames has laid a palm over an old bruise on Arthur’s thigh, there are tears escaping from under his eyelashes.

“Hey,” Eames whispers. “I’m sorry.”

Arthur doesn’t respond to Eames, doesn’t even open his eyes except that one hand gropes out and finds Eames’ own. “You’re okay,” Eames says, like an assurance or a prediction, but he’s open to correction.

Arthur nods.

Eames touches his face, thumbing away the water collected near his eyes. “I’m going to take care of you,” he says. When Arthur stops crying, Eames stretches out next to him, body turning to fur and reshaping as he does. Eames puts his heavy head and a single paw on Arthur’s chest to ground him, and Arthur puts a hand in his mane without prompting.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But if you try sometimes, you just might find...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story has been quite a ride for me, and thank you everyone who took it with me. when i posted this story, it was because i was so so so stuck on it (around chapter three or four) and i knew posting would be the only way for me to get in gear. Extra thank yous to ChasingRiverSong, youcantsaymylastname, kate_the_reader, kedgeree11, sevenimpossiblethings, amysnotdeadyet, involuntaryorange, sofia_gigante and everyone else who spent ALL DAY writing with me, today, or just stopped by & did a quick comb through for me. Happy WIP amnesty in the Inception fam. ;)

Eames trusts himself. He’s not perfect, and he's a little flip, but he's also a good member of a pack. He knows he can rely on himself to take good care of Arthur.

The problem is, one day, he and Arthur might not be together. There could be a day, for Arthur, that is in a post Eames life, and although he does not particularly picture it, he does want to be prepared for that sort of future. Or rather, he wants Arthur to be prepared for that sort of future, with someone who can’t sense Arthur’s anxiety when things start to move away from his comfort zone. Or worse, after Eames, Arthur could go back to hooking up with guys that couldn’t fucking care less. Again.

The whole thing gives him a terrified migraine, but he’s trying to be proactive without picturing the bleak future he’s trying to equip Arthur for.

So while Arthur is working up to being able to talk to Eames honestly about his dynamic dislikes, they busy themselves with other things. They date, which is sometimes comical for two people who already live together. Arthur sleeps in his own bed sometimes, because they live together, because they’re flatmates, not because they’ve been dating for a year. Eames is amused by the whole thing, and Arthur’s right — it is, on occasion, good to be able to decompress quietly, spread across the whole bed and go find Arthur in the morning to nose him awake.

They go see movies on weeknights. They stop by a bookstore and Eames watches Arthur browse until he's ready to leave with six books tucked under his arm and his face flushed. Eames convinces him to stay put when he has his pack nights in the apartment, and Arthur is only awkward for ten minutes after he introduces him to Yusuf. Even watching TV with Arthur is different than it was when they were roommates, where Eames can lazily lose focus on his body and instead drape a tail over Arthur, or wedge up against him.  

Arthur tells him he’s always wanted to try the sensory deprivation tank, so he and Eames do a 90-minute session. Eames feels restless after, but Arthur is nearly luminous. He chatters in Eames’ ear afterwards about what scientific research says about why Arthur feels giddy and boneless until Eames says, “Alright, Jstor, let’s get you home before you start befriending small woodland creatures.”

Eames is enjoying himself immensely. Sex with Arthur is fun, and for the first month or two, frequently gives Eames a pang of pain and pleasure when Arthur looks pleasantly surprised about how seriously Eames takes his enjoyment.

Arthur works up to getting some of the things he wants. Eames ties him up the night he asks. Eames hardly even has to prod because Arthur follows up with: “Not to things, really. I like feeling like I’m a bit helpless, but I don’t really like being trapped against a physical location.”

“Just yourself?” Eames clarifies, touching his wrists together to clarify.

“Just to myself,” Arthur agrees.

“I’m proud of you,” Eames says, bumping his chin gently against the side of Arthur’s face. Arthur smiles at Eames’ praise.

The fact that Arthur spent so long stupidly lonely doesn’t make any fucking sense to Eames. He’s so hopelessly _eager._ Even with him trawling as carelessly as he was for unregulated BDSM activity, someone should have noticed. How does someone end up with _so many_ bad doms’ attention, so many times in a row?

All Eames knows is, he’s going to show Arthur that his boundaries are worthwhile. That his own safety and pleasure and comfort are not secondary.  

“Do you have a safe word?” Eames needs to know, because it’s the first time they’ve really moved towards Arthur’s goal, and in that direction lies the kind of activities that need him to feel like there’s a secret back door, available for his use in times of discomfort.

Arthur looks like he isn’t sure what answer Eames is looking for.

“Here’s the thing,” Eames says, to explain before Arthur has a chance to spin himself out, “I’m not crazy about them —”

“Okay,” Arthur blurts. “No problem.”

Eames levels a glare at him. “No, it _is_ a problem. You jumped the gun before I finished. _I_ don’t tend to require them because I’m not personally comfortable with any kind of consent play. If you say, _ew_ or _I don’t want to_ or _stop_ or _no,_ that’s when I stop. And I need you to know that I’m not going to think any less of you if you want to stop at any point. And that doesn’t mean we have to stop being intimate. If there’s an element you’re not comfortable with, you can let me know, and we can reevaluate what’s going on, or, you know, pull our pants and trousers back on and put on a film.”

“Pants and trousers,” Arthur snickers.

“Not the point. Focus. So in the past, I don’t think you’ve been very comfortable with that, which means that it’s pretty important now that you have one. Even if you don’t use it, it will make me feel better that you have one, and maybe it’ll feel easier for you to say, you know, _raspberries_ , than _no._ ”

“I’m allergic to raspberries,” Arthur says. He doesn’t look jovial anymore. His voice is small.

“I know,” Eames says. “It was just an example, because, you know, it seems like a situation that might require immediate intervention, and no guilt on your part.”

“You’ve put some thought into this,” Arthur says.

“It came to me a few nights ago,” Eames admits.

“Raspberries,” Arthur says, nodding. “Immediate action, no guilt.”

Arthur keeps telling Eames that he’s being _thoughtful,_ but that doesn’t sit right with Eames. It’s not that he’s doing anything intentionally, but Arthur seems to occupy all of the space in Eames’ head. He wakes up some mornings and he’s already halfway into a thought about him before he’s even opened his eyes. It’s even worse when they’ve slept in the same bed and Eames wakes up half or fully shifted, senses ramped up to eleven and Arthur’s multi-dimensional presence registering with each of them.

He’s not being thoughtful, he’s just tangled up in the reality of Arthur right now.

So that night, when Eames takes him to bed a few hours later, Eames says, “You still want what we talked about earlier?” and hears Arthur’s heart speed up in response. It’s a good speed, like a kickdrum and not like a startled animal.

“Yeah,” Arthur murmurs. “Yes, please.”

“Mmm,” Eames smiles. “I like the way that sounds.”

Arthur gives him a knowing look before adopting a more sloped posture, body loose. “Please,” he says, voice dropping an octave, and Eames is immensely interested in the sound of that, too.

He’s made a trip to get a nylon loop, and his awareness of where it’s stashed under his bed sits like a secret between the two of them, private. He moves in to kiss Arthur, sipping at first but then with a hint of teeth at Eames’ bottom lip.

“Go sit down,” Eames instructs, and Arthur moves, situating himself, with just his head propped up against the headboard. “Good.”

Eames sits down next to him, coming in close enough to put a single finger on Arthur’s lower lip. His whole body is tensed, clothesline shoulders and one balled fist, but he leans readily enough into the point of contact.

“That's it,” Eames says as Arthur's eyes flutter shut. Eames brushes the thumb of his other hand along the soft fan of Arthur's dark eyelashes.

“You should relax,” Eames says, flying by the seat of his pants. He's done this before, but not with Arthur, really. “I'm going to be in charge of you for a little while.”

“Alright,” Arthur says, against Eames’ fingertips.

“Say it for me.”

“You're in charge.”

“That's right,” Eames says. In Eames’ room, the window overlooks the retention pond, which lights nicely at night. His gaze lingers there before he looks back at Arthur. “And I’m going to do a good job of being in charge, so you don’t have to worry. But if something goes wrong, you’re going to say ...”

Arthur’s mouth twists dryly. “Something is going wrong?” It sounds like a guess.

“Sure,” Eames says. “But if you don’t feel like you can say that?”

“Raspberry,” Arthur says. His heart picks up and Eames puts his thumb against the underside of Arthur’s chin so he can feel the jump of it intimately.

“Good,” Eames says. “Close your eyes, please.”

Eames has been thinking of this since the moment they got out of that Zen Chamber that had turned Arthur into a writhing puppy, and left Eames feeling anything but zen. He’d picked up some supplies, then. It feels appropriate to use them now.

Eames rummages under his bed, getting out the nylon bindings and fabric he bought for this purpose. He ties Arthur's hands at the wrist, careful to make wide loops.

“You good?”

Arthur tugs hard at his wrists, and after a brief tussle, they're still wrapped tight. Arthur falls back heavily against Eames’ headboard. “I'm solid,” he declares.

“Good,” Eames says, moving them so the bound knot of his hands sits on his stomach. “Because that’s just the beginning.”

Eames throws his knee wide so that he’s perched above Arthur’s chest, the helpless, tied-up line of him, boxing him in across his torso. Pinned like this, Arthur’s breath quickens beneath him. Eames can feel the heave of it through his thighs, even without putting his whole weight on Arthur.

Arthur looks flustered, but focused, looking up at Eames with determined eyes.

Eames touches him, just barely, letting his fingertips just barely catch from Arthur’s temple at his hairline down the side of his face. As his touch slips past Arthur’s mouth, he turns his head to catch it with his mouth.

“Ah, ah,” Eames teases. “Not yet. I’ll let you suck, but on my time.”

Arthur nods, letting out a little huff of breath through his mouth. His eyes are dark as Eames’ hand moves past his lips again, down his neck, drumming briefly on Arthur’s adam’s apple and moving on to his shoulders. The muscles there are understated: Arthur’s musculature is practical and not bulky, but with his hands bound at his stomach and Eames penning him in, they stand out. He presses his thumb into a bite mark he put there, a day faded.

“Lovely,” Eames says, and Arthur turns his head into the pillow, closing his eyes. Eames takes his chin in his hands. “Look at me Arthur. Keep your eyes open.”

Arthur swallows hard, Eames hears it loudly in the silence of his bedroom, and the sound of it flickers in his stomach, stirs up a fresh wave of arousal.

“I want you to be here,” he says. “I’ve got you here, and I’m going to take care of you, so your job is to be present and do what I say unless you start having problems with your allergies.”

Arthur gives him a nod, rucking up his hair in the back. Eames wants to laugh, but he keeps his face serious.

“Alright,” Arthur agrees. Eames gives his chest a squeeze with his thighs, pressing his erection into Arthur’s sternum as he does. Arthur strains up into it, and Eames fights the urge to turn it into something, to grind down onto him. He’s got other plans.

“I’m going to climb off of you in a minute,” Eames says. “And I’m going to sit over there and wait for you to get out of your clothes.”

Arthur makes a disbelieving frown.

“I have faith in you,” Eames says.

Eames once again keeps the amusement off his face when Arthur gets to it, after Eames climbs down the length of his body and sits in the rolling chair in the corner of his room, turned towards the bed instead of the desk for once.

Arthur struggles with his shirt, using his bound hands to pinch at the material of his shoulders before he realizes that he’s probably better off starting with his trousers. He gets the button of them apart easily enough, and the zipper, but he has to do an undignified scoot to get them low enough off his hips and bottom to start peeling his legs out of them. His whole torso works while he gets them off, finally getting them down to his feet and slipping free of them, leaving a pile of inside-out denims on the floor at the foot of the bed and kicking them off with his newly freed feet. His triumph gives him a surge of energy to go back to his shirt, getting it over his head after an awkward struggle, where it comes to rest, unable to get past his tied wrists.

“Hm,” Eames says, taking the bundle of fabric trapped at his wrists. “I think we’ll probably leave that there.”

“Okay,” Arthur agrees.

“But you left your pants on,” Eames says, flicking Arthur on his hipbone. “That won’t do.”

Arthur scrambles for that next, scrambling for them with awkward fingertips.

“You can ask for help,” Eames advises.

“I — know,” Arthur says, and wrestles himself out of his undergarments by himself.

“Alright,” Eames says, grinning a little bit. “Now do me.”

Arthur’s hair is ridiculous, rumpled and a little sweaty, and he shoots Eames a disbelieving look.

“Come on,” Eames cajoles. “You’ll make me happy.”

Arthur doesn’t hesitate, moving in to the stomach of Eames’ own shirt, moving it up and off his waistband with his nose, and catching the bunched fabric with his teeth. Eames cooperates, ducking when appropriate to help him pull it off, and then they both look at his jeans. Arthur tries to use his fingers to scrabble at that, but the way he’s bound wrist-to-wrist leaves him unable to access his opposable thumbs even without a t-shirt getting in his way there. Arthur huffs out through his teeth.

“Eames? What do you want me to do here?”

“You did a good enough job of my shirt,” Eames says, shrugging, but there’s a smile at the corner of his mouth.

Arthur leans down and tries to bite at it. And then tries again. By the third try, Eames is laughing. Arthur rocks back, a hurt look on his face. “ _You_ asked me to do this, so you might as well not be a dick.”

“I’m sorry,” Eames says, still amused. “I’m not laughing at you, Arthur. I’m laughing at me. I’m trying to be what you need, but I’m not a pro at this. Obviously porn has made me misjudge how easy it is to get someone’s jeans off with their teeth.” Eames rolls his eyes as he reaches down to get his own jeans off. “You did great. Climb back on the bed.”

Arthur obeys. Moving back to where Eames had him positioned before, flat on his back.

“Yeah,” Eames confirms, palming the swell of his pectoral, the swell of it, and pinching a nipple. “Right where I want you. You stay where you are and be a good boy for me and I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Yes,” Arthur agrees, licking his bottom lip.

Eames hooks his thumb into the waistband of his boxer briefs, sliding them down with slow showmanship. He’s fond of his body, tied to it in ways beyond human ownership. “I’m going to climb back on you,” Eames says. “And this time I’m going to put my cock in your mouth.”

“Oh,” Arthur says. His eyelashes flutter shut, briefly, before springing back up, as if he suddenly remembers Eames’ previous orders. His cheeks look faintly pink, and his pupils have taken over most of his eyes. Hungry is a good look on him.

“You good?” Eames says, after he settles himself on Arthur’s chest. Arthur thrashes beneath him, and settles after he finds himself effectively pinned.

“Yeah,” Arthur says, on a ragged inhalation.

“Okay,” Eames says, and cups his cock around the base. Arthur eyes it, mouth falling open almost unconsciously. “You look so helpless. All tied up for me. Good thing you have someone to take care of you.”

By the time Eames is tilting his hips to move his cock into Arthur’s mouth, Eames gets the feeling that Arthur’s brain is sliding blissfully offline. He murmurs endearments the whole time, moving in and out of Arthur’s mouth a little roughly, but with enough consistency that Arthur is able to pick up on the timing and coordinate his breathing. Eames holds on to Arthur’s hair, holding onto him but not pulling unnecessarily.

Arthur’s mouth is red and wet, body squirming under Eames, and when Eames reaches back to grope at Arthur’s cock, it’s fossil hard in his hand. Arthur’s body bucks beneath him at the single touch, and Eames gives it one more friendly squeeze before letting go.

“I’ll get to that,” Eames assures him, grinning. “But right now I need you to stay focused, and keep on task. Can you do that?”

Arthur nods, eager but careful not to dislodge Eames from his mouth.

“Good,” Eames says, and presses himself deeper into Arthur’s willing mouth. The pleasure is magnified by the visual of Arthur, pinned and blissed out, letting his cock slide in and out of his mouth so sweetly, looking up at him with hazy eyes.

Eames feels himself drifting closer and closer, until it’s less of a drift and more of a scramble down the slippery slope. He pulls out in time to come across Arthur, and not down his throat. They’ve talked about it before, that Arthur would be okay with it if it happened, but Eames has never done it before.

Beneath him, Arthur has a slash of Eames’ ejaculate across his neck and jaw. “You look so good like that,” Eames says, swiping his thumb across it. “Like you belong to me. If someone could see you right now, they’d have no doubt who you belong to.”

Eames gets off of Arthur, eases down his body. His cock has been neglected so long that when he blows a stream of cold air across it, his stomach visibly quivers.

“Poor baby,” Eames cooes, only half teasing. “Somebody should deal with that.”

Arthur follows Eames’ gaze, as if he’s surprised by his own physiological reaction.

“Would you like me to get you off?” Eames says, voice pitched low. “You should tell me what you want.”

“Please,” Arthur says. He’s gorgeous, he’s something priceless, and some nightclub prick had no idea. Something protective swells in Eames before he remembers that it’s not necessary — he doesn’t have to protect Arthur from nightclub pricks now, he just has to do better.

Eames raises an eyebrow. “Please what?”

“Get me off, Eames,” Arthur says. “Please.” He sounds so fucking wrecked, looks like a mess. He’s gorgeous. Eames marvels for a moment at his own life.

“Alright.”

He moves Arthur up so they’re both sitting, maneuvers him so that he straddles his lap, leaning in to nip at his neck. Arthur’s head falls to the side, giving Eames unfettered access to make a few marks from his collarbone to his shoulder.

“Gorgeous,” he says.

“Thanks,” Arthur says, head still lolling. Eames holds him steady with one hand while he reaches beside him to pick up the lotion he keeps beside his bed for personal use, shifting Arthur to coat it liberally on his thigh.

“If you want to get off,” he says, positioning Arthur back where he wants him, “you’re going to have to make it happen.”

Arthur looks at Eames, searching for something. Eames waits for him to find it before he nods, smiling a little. “Alright,” he says, and moves his legs until he finds good purchase with his feet. Eames keeps his thigh flexed for Arthur to drag himself across, his hard cock slipping up and down it. Even this soon after his orgasm, Eames is interested, watches Arthur like a hawk.

“You’re amazing,” Eames says, scratching lightly down Arthur’s chest, thumbing his hipbone as he launches himself back and forth, breath coming erratically. Eames can’t keep his hands off of Arthur, or from letting his leg jump a bit, just to give Arthur a jolt. Arthur says a ragged _please_ before he comes, more breath than actual word, and Eames says, “Of course, of course,” and curls his broad hand around Arthur’s bloody, lovely cock, giving him a vice grip from head to root, and Arthur groans into it, spending and then slumping forward to rest his forehead on Eames’ broad neck. His hands are still tied between them, but Arthur doesn’t fidget with them.

“Was that good for you?” Eames says, nosing around Arthur’s ear and petting through his hair. Arthur is limp against him, but nods with miniscule movements against his skin. Eames lets out a weak laugh.

“Easy tiger,” he says, moving him down to the thrashed bedding and untying Arthur’s hands from the middle of his shirt, crumpled beyond belief at his wrists. The corner of the sheet has dislodged itself from Eames’ bed, and he snaps it back in place before he goes about wiping all of various collected jizz from between them.

Eames rubs Arthur’s hands, wincing when he thinks about what they must feel like, but Arthur is completely blank, looks dazed and lets Eames roll him over onto his side when he’s done. He doesn’t even bat an eye when Eames strokes a finger down his face, forehead to nose. He closes his eyes under the ministrations, Eames' hands on his face and hair, down the side of his neck, brushing his knuckles on the underside of Arthur's chin. His thumbs across the splayed feather of Arthur's resting eyelashes. 

“Don’t go to sleep yet,” Eames says, pressing a kiss to Arthur's eyebrow, intending to make him some juice before they curl up, but Arthur shushes him with a finger on his lips.

“Alright,” Eames says, and without thinking about it too much, starts to shift. He’d been aware of Arthur before, of course, the heft and sounds and smells of him, but shifted and nestled up behind him, nothing else exists. He noses into Arthur’s hair. He can tell he’s not asleep, but he’s dozing pleasantly. The lion wants to watch over him, make sure nothing happens to him.

His senses are better this way. With one heavy arm draped over Arthur’s chest, Eames knows that there’s nothing that could get by him like this. Arthur’s heartbeat is conversation-loud, slow and calm. It’s gorgeous. In all the time he lived with Arthur, making himself miserable, he never thought he was going to see this — Arthur smelling sweaty and sated, no anxiety or restlessness or marks that scream of a night spun out of control.

Just his boyfriend, at home and safe in his bed where he can listen to his pulse.

“Are you reading my mind right now?” Arthur mumbles, sounding inhumanly groggy, and Eames can’t answer without shifting, and he’s exhausted, so he just shakes his shaggy head and nestles back down for the night.

*

They still live together. Nothing gets horribly derailed. Eames had half-worried it might, because some part of his thought, _how could Arthur possibly know what he wants if he’s never had anything approximating it?_ Because Arthur was searching for something, and came home let down, but he couldn’t have known for sure that he was searching in the right direction. He'd been half terrified that Arthur would wake up and recoil, think  _you're just like all the others._

It doesn't come. In the morning, Arthur looks peaceful, not touching Eames, but close enough, and curled towards him.

In the morning, Eames leaves before Arthur, and sometimes he’s still rumpled in his bed, and Eames can lean down and suck a small mark into Arthur’s inner thigh before he goes off to work, patting it fondly before he goes. “Hands off,” he says, having worked up some interest. “I’ll be back to collect that later.”

*

Neither of them works on Sundays, so if neither of them has other plans or commitments, they can lounge about the apartment before they start the day, and that’s the nicest sort of morning, where they can chat and make breakfast together before deciding where they’re headed.

“Are you young for a pack alpha?” Arthur wants to know, while they wait for the water to boil.

Eames makes an equivocating noise. “Well. Yes and no, I guess.”

“Well,” Arthur says, looking like he's biting down on a laugh. “Are you or aren't you?”

“Historically, I guess. But not in a modern context?” Eames says. “Like. A modern pack is more like a pick-up rugby team than a tribe. My mom is the alpha of her pack, in England, and she runs that more like a business. Anyways, don’t you know everything?”

“I thought it would be invasive to do research on you,” Arthur admits. “And then I found out that you’ve got vibes because you’ve made some kind of mental claim on me. I was a little worried you’d know.”

“To be clear,” Eames says, grinning, “I just want you to know that there’s no pack telepathy. It’s strictly physiological vibes I get from you. I get grumpy when you’re hungry and I don’t know if I’m annoyed on your behalf or if I’m just feeling how you’re feeling.”

“I _am_ crabby when my blood sugar gets low,” Arthur admits, peering down into his pot and then using a ladle to pour the hot water over his styrofoam cup of noodles.

“There you have it. But I’ve never known from the next room that you’re thinking of me when you’re wanking.”

Arthur’s hand falters, and he spills hot water all down the counter. Eames smirks at him. “I mean. Not that you ever thought of me when you were wanking when you moved in.”

“Of course not,” Arthur croaks. Eames puts a fond hand on the back of his neck, drawing his thumb down the tendon there.

*

“I thought about what you said, the night we got together.”

“Oh yeah? What was that?”

“Well.” Arthur is turning pink. “You said something kind of off the cuff, but it stuck with me.”

“Let's hear it.”

Arthur takes a long breath in through his nose. “You were joking about a FetLife profile.”

Eames remembers right as Arthur says it. Hope catches in his chest, but he does his best to sound casually interested. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You said I was looking for someone who will give me a spanking without making me feel like shit,” Arthur says. Eames waits, eyebrow raised. “Anyways, that sounds good.”

“Alright. That’s what we’ll do.”

“But in a larger context, too. That kind of sums it up. I want — I don’t know, I want all kind of things, but it doesn’t really feel good unless I feel like the other person is on my side. Like, what’s the point of doing all of the shit if the other person doesn’t want you to succeed? Like. Even if I want somebody to hurt me, I don’t want him to make me feel shitty. I can do that all on my own.”

 _There it is._ Eames springs up, moving into Arthur’s space and gripping him by the shoulders. “Arthur,” he breathes, and pulls him in, squeezing him until he lifts Arthur off the floor.

Arthur squirms in his arms. “Put me down,” he grumbles, tapping half-heartedly at Eames’ shoulder, but Eames keeps holding him, turning his head to press a kiss to Arthur’s temple. “That’s it. That’s exactly what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to do anything you want me to, but I won’t try to humiliate you or make you feel less than you are.”

Eames peppers his face with kisses, just so excited to hear something honest, painfully so, from Arthur, who he used to find so inscrutable, who he just wants to make happy, now.

They don’t, that night, because they both have work in the morning, but they do make out, in Arthur’s bed for once, because Eames has been lazy about laundry and his room is a mess, but the next Saturday night they both have off, Eames does.

It’s funny, and a little bit glorious, having finally unlocked one of the things that really and truly makes Arthur happy, and how incongruous the whole thing feels.

He’s not crazy about it, or, he is, not in and of himself, but the way Arthur squirms when he thumps his arse, Arthur stretched across his lap, while he tells him he’s _doing so well_ and that he’s _fucking lovely,_ and Eames is just astounded that his gorgeous boyfriend will put himself through (and enjoy) all manner of things just to be encouraged through them.

(It sneaks into his everyday life, of course. It would be impossible for Eames to stop himself once he knows, they’re out in the woods with his pack, and he can’t help but notice, in a private purr, how _fucking lovely_ he is.)

The first time Arthur cried, Eames stopped completely, panicking a little, and Arthur had tried not to be grumpy, but Eames could tell he was disappointed, but once Eames had been spooked, he couldn’t make himself keep going, despite Arthur’s insistence that he was fine. Eames is getting better at it, getting Arthur worked up the the level he likes while being sure enough of himself that he’s not worried that he’s damaging him.

Now, Arthur’s cock is hard between his legs, messy and neglected. And he ruts in between Eames’ thighs every time his hand comes down to sting the red flesh of his backside. Arthur pants, half dazed, and Eames assures him that he’s so gorgeous, lovely, so strong and throws in the fact that he’s got a gorgeous brain, filing nonsense facts away one after the other like a nail gun, burying them deep in case one of them ever comes in handy.

As soon as Eames is done he will seal his mouth around his cock, one strong arm around the small of Arthur’s back to keep him from having to lay on his stinging arse. “Look at you,” Eames says, fond as he cradles his hips in his big hands. He’s been so wrapped up in Arthur that he forgets fully occupy his body, and he’s a little surprised to feel Arthur’s hands come to rest on his furry ears.

Eames presses his face to Arthur’s cock, still not done with his litany of nonsense endearments, and he means to say, “ _you take everything I give you so well,_ ” but instead he says “ _I fucking love you._ ”

He stills, tensing, and Arthur frowns above him. Eames goes back to his task, getting Arthur off in long, sucking pulls, and padding to their bathroom after to spit his come out in the sink. When he gets back, Arthur is wincingly sitting up. “Did you mean that, or did it happen in the, ah, heat of the moment?”

“Both?” Eames says, which is true, but he’s suddenly nervous, so it comes out like a guess.

“Both is good,” Arthur says, pulling Eames down onto his bed. Eames puts himself on his back, because Arthur lies on his stomach on nights where he wants Eames to spank him, and they get the most out of conversations this way.

“I love you too,” Arthur says, and the surprise of it gives Eames a mane.

“You’re ridiculous,” Arthur says, grinning and putting his hand in it, and Eames realizes that Arthur doesn’t know it happened on accident.

“I guess so,” Eames agrees, and smiles back at him. He feels ridiculous, in the best way. He wants to shift so he can run a few miles on his fresh adrenaline high. Part of him wants to call him mum, which is definitely, certifiably, batshit. He settles for pulling his boyfriend of top of him.

“This is more comfortable when you’ve shifted,” Arthur tells him.

Arthur doesn’t have to ask twice.


End file.
